Craig's Wife | |
---|---|
Written by | George Kelly |
Characters | Billy Birkmire Harry Mazie Mrs. Harriet Craig Mrs. Frazier Eugene Fredericks Ethel Landreth Joseph Catelle Miss Irene Austen Walter Craig Mrs. Harold |
Date premiered | October 12, 1925 |
Place premiered | Morosco Theatre New York City, New York, US |
Original language | English |
Genre | Drama |
Setting | The Reception Room at the Home of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Craig |
Craig's Wife is a 1925 play written by American playwright George Kelly. It won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, [1] and has been adapted for three feature films.
Craig's Wife premiered on Broadway at the Morosco Theatre on October 12, 1925, and closed on August 21, 1926, after 360 performances. Directed by playwright Kelly, the cast featured Chrystal Herne as Harriet Craig, Anne Sutherland (Miss Austen), Charles Trowbridge (Walter Craig), and Josephine Hull (Mrs. Frazier). [2]
It was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1925–1926.
The play received the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Pulitzer committee wrote, "Craig's Wife has been selected by the jury on account of the dignity of its theme, the soundness of its construction, the excellence of its dialogue, and its effectiveness in the theater." [3]
There have been at least three films based on the play. The 1928 silent version was directed by William C. deMille, Cecil's brother, and starred Irene Rich in the title role. In 1936, Columbia Pictures made a film adaptation with Rosalind Russell as Harriet Craig. [4] The 1950 film Harriet Craig , featuring Joan Crawford, was also based on the play.
Cecil B. deMille produced Craig's Wife on the Lux Radio Theatre in Hollywood in 1936. It featured Rosalind Russell and Herbert Marshall. Orson Welles's The Campbell Playhouse performed the play on CBS Radio, airing March 10, 1940. This version featured Welles as Walter Craig, and Ann Harding as Harriet Craig.
Roland Young was an English-born actor. He began his acting career on the London stage, but later found success in America and received an Academy Award nomination for his role in the film Topper (1937).
William Brian de Lacy Aherne was an English actor of stage, screen, radio and television, who enjoyed a long and varied career in Britain and the United States.
Lux Radio Theatre, sometimes spelled Lux Radio Theater, a classic radio anthology series, was broadcast on the NBC Blue Network (1934–35) ; CBS Radio network (1935–54), and NBC Radio (1954–55). Initially, the series adapted Broadway plays during its first two seasons before it began adapting films. These hour-long radio programs were performed live before studio audiences. The series became the most popular dramatic anthology series on radio, broadcast for more than 20 years and continued on television as the Lux Video Theatre through most of the 1950s. The primary sponsor of the show was Unilever through its Lux Soap brand.
William Churchill deMille, also spelled de Mille or De Mille, was an American screenwriter and film director from the silent film era through the early 1930s. He was also a noted playwright prior to moving into film. Once he was established in film he specialized in adapting Broadway plays into silent films.
Ray Bidwell Collins was an American character actor in stock and Broadway theatre, radio, films, and television. With 900 stage roles to his credit, he became one of the most successful actors in the developing field of radio drama. A friend and associate of Orson Welles for many years, Collins went to Hollywood with the Mercury Theatre company and made his feature-film debut in Citizen Kane (1941), as Kane's political rival. Collins appeared in more than 75 films and had one of his best-remembered roles on television, as Los Angeles homicide detective Lieutenant Arthur Tragg in the CBS-TV series Perry Mason.
The Magnificent Ambersons is a 1918 novel by Booth Tarkington, the second in his Growth trilogy after The Turmoil (1915) and before The Midlander. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
George Edward Kelly was an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. He began his career in vaudeville as an actor and sketch writer. He became best known for his satiric comedies, including The Torch-Bearers (1922) and The Show-Off (1924). He won the Pulitzer Prize for Craig's Wife (1925).
Owen Gould Davis was an American dramatist known for writing more than 200 plays and having most produced. In 1919, he became the first elected president of the Dramatists Guild of America. He received the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Icebound, His plays and scripts included works for radio and film.
Harriet Craig is a 1950 American drama film starring Joan Crawford. The screenplay by Anne Froelick and James Gunn was based upon the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1925 play Craig's Wife, by George Kelly. The film was directed by Vincent Sherman, produced by William Dozier, and distributed by Columbia Pictures. Harriet Craig is the second of three cinematic collaborations between Sherman and Crawford, the others being The Damned Don't Cry (1950) and Goodbye, My Fancy (1951).
Edith Barrett was an American actress. She was a romantic star on Broadway and in the Little Theatre Movement in New England summer stock from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. Her repertoire included plays by James M. Barrie, William Shakespeare, Noël Coward, Robert Browning, A.A. Milne, and George Bernard Shaw. Her best-known cinematic work includes I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Ruthless (1948) and Jane Eyre (1943).
Frank Daniel Gilroy was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film producer and director. He received the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play The Subject Was Roses in 1965.
They Knew What They Wanted is a 1924 play written by Sidney Howard. The play premiered on Broadway in 1924 and had three Broadway revivals as well as a London production.
Erin O'Brien-Moore was an American actress. She created the role of Rose in the original Broadway production of Elmer Rice's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Street Scene (1929), and was put under contract in Hollywood and made a number of films in the 1930s. Her promising career on the stage and screen was interrupted by severe injuries she sustained in a 1939 fire. Following her recovery and extensive plastic surgery, she returned to the stage and character roles in films and television, including four seasons of the primetime serial drama Peyton Place (1965–1968).
Icebound is a 1923 play written by American playwright Owen Davis, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It is set in Veazie, Maine, a suburb of Bangor.
Craig's Wife is a 1936 American drama film starring Rosalind Russell as a domineering wife. It was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1925 Broadway play of the same name by George Kelly, and directed by Dorothy Arzner. Former MGM star William Haines was the film's production designer. Previously filmed in 1928, Craig's Wife was remade in 1950 as Harriet Craig, rewritten as a vehicle for Joan Crawford and co-starring Wendell Corey.
Escape is a play in nine episodes by the British writer John Galsworthy. The world premiere was on August 12, 1926 at the Ambassadors Theatre in London's West End, produced by Leon M. Lion. The play ran until March of the following year, when it went on tour of England with Gerald Ames in the lead role.
Hired Wife is a 1940 American romantic comedy film directed by William A. Seiter and starring Rosalind Russell, Brian Aherne and Virginia Bruce.
Nora Cecil was an English-born American actress whose 30-year career spanned both the silent and sound film eras.
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