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.
Paul Lukas was a Hungarian actor. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and the first Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, for his performance in the film Watch on the Rhine (1943), reprising the role he created on the Broadway stage.
Diana Wynyard, CBE was an English stage and film actress.
Lillian Florence Hellman was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist views 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.
Broadway theatre, or Broadway, is a theatre genre that consists of the theatrical performances presented in 41 professional theaters, each with 500 or more seats, in the Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Broadway and London's West End together represent the highest commercial level of live theater in the English-speaking world.
Marguerita Maria Christians, known as Mady Christians, was an Austrian-born German-American actress who had a successful acting career in theatre and film in the United States until she was blacklisted during the McCarthy period.
The Children's Hour is a 1934 American play by Lillian Hellman. It is a drama set in an all-girls boarding school run by two women, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie. An angry student, Mary Tilford, runs away from the school and, to avoid being sent back, tells her grandmother that the two headmistresses are having a lesbian affair. The accusation proceeds to destroy the women's careers, relationships, and lives.
George Alexander Coulouris was an English film and stage actor.
Lucile Watson was a Canadian actress, long based in the United States. She was "famous for her roles of formidable dowagers."
Justin Brooks Atkinson was an American theatre critic. He worked for The New York Times from 1922 to 1960. In his obituary, the Times called him "the theater's most influential reviewer of his time." Atkinson became a Times theater critic in the 1920s and his reviews became very influential. He insisted on leaving the drama desk during World War II to report on the war, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his work as the Moscow correspondent for the Times. He returned to the theater beat in the late 1940s, until his retirement in 1960.
Samuel Nathaniel Behrman was an American playwright, screenwriter, biographer, and longtime writer for The New Yorker. His son is the composer David Behrman.
The Lena Horne Theatre is a Broadway theater at 256 West 47th Street in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Opened in 1926, it was designed by Herbert J. Krapp in a Spanish Revival style and was constructed for Irwin Chanin. It has 1,069 seats across two levels and is operated by the Nederlander Organization. Both the facade and the auditorium interior are New York City landmarks.
The Lark is a 1952 play about Joan of Arc by the French playwright Jean Anouilh.. It was first presented at the Théâtre Montparnasse, Paris in October 1953. Translated into English by Christopher Fry in 1955, it was then adapted by Lillian Hellman for the Broadway production in the same year.
Kermit Bloomgarden was an American theatrical producer. He was an accountant before he began producing plays on Broadway including Death of a Salesman (1949), The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), The Music Man (1957), Look Homeward, Angel (1957), and Equus (1973).
Toys in the Attic is a 1960 play by Lillian Hellman.
The Autumn Garden is a 1951 play by Lillian Hellman. The play is set in September, 1949 in a summer home in a resort on the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 miles from New Orleans. The play is a study of the defeats, disappointments and diminished expectations of people reaching middle age. For inspiration, Hellman drew on her memories of her time in her aunts' boardinghouse. Dashiell Hammett, who had been Hellman's lover for 20 years, helped her write the play and received 15 percent of the royalties. Of all Hellman's plays it was her favorite.
The Green Bay Tree is a 1933 three-act drama written by Mordaunt Shairp that explores a "half-suggested homosexual relationship" between a man and his protégé or, in the words of one critic "a rich hot-house sybarite" and someone "he adopted at a tender age and has reared in emasculating luxury". It was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1933-1934.
Margin for Error is a two-act play written in 1939 by Clare Boothe Luce. It is a satire of Nazism, and was staged on Broadway shortly after World War II began in Europe. The plot is a whodunit about the murder of a German consul in the United States. The play was adapted as a movie of the same name in 1943.
Kurt Müller was the deputy chairman of the Communist Party of Germany. He was one of the victims of the Stalinist purges in the early 1950s. Müller was arrested in East Germany in March 1950. He traveled from West Germany, believing he would be attending an important meeting, only to be accused of being an enemy agent and Trotskyite. While in Soviet custody, he was interrogated by the Stasi chief Erich Mielke, and spent six years imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen camp, the former Nazi concentration camp which continued operating as NKVD special camp Nr. 7 under NKVD control in the Soviet Occupation Zone.
