Dame Vanessa Redgrave is an English actress and activist. Throughout her career spanning over six decades, Redgrave has garnered numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a Tony Award and two Primetime Emmy Awards, making her one of the few performers to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting. She has also received various honorary awards, including the BAFTA Fellowship Award, the Golden Lion Honorary Award, and an induction into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
The Little Foxes is a 1939 play by Lillian Hellman, considered a classic of 20th century drama. Its title comes from Chapter 2, Verse 15 of the Song of Solomon in the King James version of the Bible, which reads, "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes." Set in a small town in Alabama in 1900, it focuses on the struggle for control of a family business. Tallulah Bankhead starred in the original production as Regina Hubbard Giddens.
Watch on the Rhine is a 1943 American drama film directed by Herman Shumlin and starring Bette Davis and Paul Lukas. The screenplay by Dashiell Hammett is based on the 1941 play Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman. Watch on the Rhine was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and Paul Lukas won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Kurt Muller, a German-born anti-fascist in this film.
Alfred Zinnemann was an Austrian Empire-born American film director. He won four Academy Awards for directing and producing films in various genres, including thrillers, westerns, film noir and play adaptations. He made 25 feature films during his 50-year career.
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the characters he created are Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, The Continental Op and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9.
Julia is a 1977 American WWII drama film directed by Fred Zinnemann, from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent. It is based on a chapter from Lillian Hellman's 1973 book Pentimento about the author's relationship with a lifelong friend, Julia, who fought against the Nazis in the years prior to World War II. The film stars Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook, Rosemary Murphy, Maximilian Schell and Meryl Streep.
Lillian Florence Hellman was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist sympathies and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–1952. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer questions by HUAC, but others believed, despite her denial, that she had belonged to the Communist Party.
Sophia Magdalena Scholl was a German student and anti-Nazi political activist, active within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany.
Henri Frenay Sandoval (1905–1988) was a French military officer and French Resistance member.
Mary Therese McCarthy was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949 and was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1949 and 1959. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title Can There Be a Gothic Literature? The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She won the National Medal for Literature and the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1984. McCarthy held honorary degrees from Bard, Bowdoin, Colby, Smith College, Syracuse University, the University of Maine at Orono, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Hull.
William Connor Wright Jr. was an American author, editor and playwright. He is best known for his non fiction writing covering a wildly divergent list of subjects: from the April in Paris Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria to genetics and behavior to true crime and grand opera.
Muriel Gardiner Buttinger was an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist.
Joseph Buttinger was an Austrian politician and, after his immigration to the United States, an expert on East Asia. He co-founded the American Friends of Vietnam, a Cold War lobbying group.
Wolf Schwabacher was a prominent Jewish entertainment lawyer, a partner in the New York City law firm of Hays, Wolf, Schwabacher, Sklar & Epstein, whose clients included the Marx Brothers, Lillian Hellman, and Erskine Caldwell.
Joseph Chamberlain Furnas was an American freelance writer. He is best known for his article, commissioned for the Reader's Digest, "---And Sudden Death!" This article brought national attention to the problem of automobile safety, and is the most-reprinted article in the Digest's history.
The Spanish Earth is a 1937 anti-fascist film made during the Spanish Civil War in support of the democratically elected Republicans, whose forces included a wide range from the political left like communists, socialists, anarchists, to moderates like centrists, and liberalist elements. The film was directed by Joris Ivens, written by John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, narrated by Orson Welles and re-recorded by Hemingway, with music composed by Marc Blitzstein and arranged by Virgil Thomson.
Misha Defonseca is a Belgian-born impostor and the author of a fraudulent Holocaust memoir titled Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, first published in 1997 and at that time professed to be a true memoir. It became an instant success in Europe and was translated into 18 languages. The French version of the book was a derivative work based on the original with the title Survivre avec les loups that was published in 1997 by the Éditions Robert Laffont; this second version was adapted into the French film of the same name.
Nechama Tec was a Polish-American historian who was Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University, where she studied and worked with the sociologist Daniel Bell, and was a Holocaust scholar. Her book When Light Pierced the Darkness (1986) and her memoir Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1984) both received the Merit of Distinction Award from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. She is also the author of the book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans on which the film Defiance (2008) is based, as well as a study of women in the Holocaust. She was awarded the 1994 International Anne Frank Special Recognition prize for it.
Watch on the Rhine is a 1941 American play by Lillian Hellman. In an essay on World War II, a contributor to The Companion to Southern Literature (2002) wrote that the play's "peculiar combination of drawing-room comedy in a genteel southern home with sinister corruption of the Nazi regime in Europe made for a unique and powerful drama, one strong enough to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award."
Herbert Enke Wilhelm Engelsing was a right-wing German Catholic lawyer in Berlin and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. When the Nazi regime began, Engelsing found himself unable to work in law. Instead he found work in the German film industry, becoming a very successful film director and producer with Tobis Film. In 1938, Engelsing and his wife Ingeborg became close friends with Libertas and Harro Schulze-Boysen who were part of a resistance organisation against the Nazis. Engelsing maintained a high profile in the film business and low profile in the resistance, but made his mark by introducing many new people into the organisation, brokering deals and providing secure locations for meetings. The couple survived the war and moved to the United States in 1947. Engelsing did not receive permanent residency due to false accusations of being the head of a Soviet sleeper cell.
