Profile of Lillian Hellman on Famous Like Me

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Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American playwright, romantically involved for thirty years with mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. She was also a long-time friend of poet Dorothy Parker. Her most famous works include The Children's Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939) and Toys in the Attic (1959).

Her public feud with fellow writer Mary McCarthy continued for years and formed the basis for the play Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron. McCarthy famously said of Hellman on The Dick Cavett Show that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman replied by filing a US$2,500,000 slander suit against McCarthy but died, at age 79, from natural causes, and the suuit was dropped by Hellman's executors.

The Oscar-winning film Julia was claimed to be based on the friendship between Hellman and the title character. Upon the film's release, in 1977, New York psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner claimed that she was "Julia" and that she had never known Hellman. Hellman replied that the person upon whom the character was based was not Gardiner. However, the facts that Hellman and Gardiner had the same lawyer (one Wolf Schwawbacher), that the lawyer had been privy to Gardiner's memoirs, and that the events in the film conform to those in the memoirs, have led to the presumption that they had been been appropriated without attribution from Gardiner.

Blacklist

Lillian Hellman appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. Asked to name names of acquaintances with communist affiliations, Hellman instead delivered a prepared statement, which read in part:

To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, 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.

As a result, Hellman was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios for many years.

List of works

• The Children's Hour (1934)
• These Three (1936)
• The Dark Angel (1935)
• Dead End (1937)
• The North Star (1943)
• The Little Foxes (1939)
• Watch on the Rhine (1940)
• Candide (1957)
• Toys in the Attic (1959)
• An Unfinished Woman (1969)
• Pentimento (1973)
• Scoundrel Time (1976)

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