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The playwright Lillian Hellman was born in Louisiana in 1905 and grew up in New Orleans and New York City. The time she spent in the South with her mother‘s family influenced the Southern characters she wrote about in her eventual scripts. By 1935 Hellman was in Hollywood as a script reader for MGM. She was encouraged to write by her long time companion Dashiell Hammett and her first professional play, T


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In 1952, at the height of McCarthyism and the fear of Communism infiltrating the U.S government and culture, she was one of the many artists brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although she discussed her own political sympathies, she refused to speak of anyone else‘s involvement with the American Communist Party. In her address to the Committee she famously said, ―I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year‘s fashion, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.‖ Her defiance caused major Hollywood studios to blacklist her, effectively ending her film and theatre career.


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Broadway hit. That success opened the door for T Li e Fxesto debut on Broadway in 1939 with the famous actress Tallulah Bankhead. T


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opened to rave reviews, played 410 performances and was made into a film in 1941 starring Bette Davis, for which Hellman wrote the screenplay.


Hellman always intended the family drama of the Hubbards, the central family inT be written as a trilogy, with T the middle story. She wrote An F


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orestas a prequel in 1946, but never wrote the last part of the story.


Hellman wrote politically charged plays revealing behavior usually masked in polite society and seldom exposed on stage. Through her work, and the artistic company she kept, Hellman was a controversially political figure.


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She did, however, continue to write and published three memoirs from 1969 to 1976. Lillian Hellman died of natural causes in 1984.


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