Biography
Born on 14 July 1918 in New York, USA, Arthur Laurents built a career of equal distinction as a stage director, playwright and screenwriter across both musical and non-musical forms. His parents discouraged his youthful goal of writing for the theatre, so during the depths of the Depression he attended New York productions unaccompanied. Early acclaim arrived through straight plays such as Home Of The Brave (1945) and The Time Of The Cuckoo (1952); he next supplied the book for the groundbreaking West Side Story (1957). The decade proved punishing: McCarthy-era blacklisting forced him to spend heavily on legal fees simply to regain his passport. Together with Leonard Bernstein he tested Stephen Sondheim for the role of lyricist on West Side Story, thereby launching the newcomer’s Broadway career. Laurents and Sondheim renewed their partnership on Gypsy (1959, music by Jule Styne), Anyone Can Whistle (1964, which Laurents also staged) and Do I Hear A Waltz? (1965). His first opportunity to direct a musical came in 1962 with I Can Get It For You Wholesale, the production that nightly halted for Barbra Streisand’s show-stopping “Miss Marmelstein.” Subsequent results varied. Though Hallelujah, Baby! (1967), written with Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, met rejection in New York, Laurents’s West End staging of Gypsy in 1973, headed by Angela Lansbury, earned widespread praise and later moved to Broadway; he returned to the same musical in 1989 with Tyne Daly. The one-woman piece The Madwoman Of Central Park West, which he created with and for Phyllis Newman, opened off-Broadway at the 22 Steps Theatre in 1979. After a Tony nomination for the original Gypsy, his direction of La Cage Aux Folles finally secured the award in 1983. No such honours greeted Nick And Nora (1991), a costly failure on which he served as both writer and director; the experience nevertheless prompted him to abandon musicals and concentrate on a cycle of plays spanning four decades—Jolson Sings Again, set in McCarthy-era Hollywood, the comedy of manners The Radical Mystique, My Good Name and Two Lives—finding receptive homes at Seattle Rep and the Manhattan Theatre Club. Earlier non-musical works include Invitation To A March (1960), scored with incidental music by Sondheim, The Way We Were, Scream, A Clearing In The Woods and the gay-themed The Enclave (1973). The Time Of The Cuckoo later became the source for Do I Hear A Waltz? and, in 1955, the film Summertime starring Katharine Hepburn; The Way We Were reached the screen in 1973 with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. Laurents wrote the screenplay for the latter as well as those for The Snake Pit (1948), Rope (1948), Caught (1948), Anna Lucasta (1949, with Philip Yordan), Anastasia (1956), Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and The Turning Point (1977). In 1995 the York Theatre Company presented him with its sixth annual Oscar Hammerstein II Award; additional distinctions encompass Golden Globe, Drama Desk, National Board of Review, Writers Guild of America, National Institute of Arts and Letters, Screen Writers Guild and Sydney Drama Critics prizes, together with induction into the Theatre Hall of Fame.