Goodrich, Frances (1891–1984)

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Goodrich, Frances (1891–1984)

American screenwriter and playwright who collaborated with her husband Albert Hackett on It's a Wonderful Life. Name variations: Frances Hackett. Born in Belleville, New Jersey, in 1891; died of lung cancer on January 29, 1984, in New York City; daughter of Henry W. and Madeliene Christie (Lloyd) Goodrich; educated at private school; Vassar College, B.A., 1912; attended the New York School of Social Service; marriedHenrik Willem van Loon (divorced 1929); married Albert Hackett, on February 7, 1931; no children.

Screenplays (all with Albert Hackett): The Secret of Madame Blanche (1933); Fugitive Lovers (1934); Hide-Out (1934); The Thin Man (1934); Ah, Wilderness! (1935); Naughty Marietta (1935); After the Thin Man (1936); Rose Marie (1936); Small Town Girl (1936); The Firefly (1937); Another Thin Man (1939); Penthouse (1939); Society Lawyer (1939); Lady in the Dark (1944); The Hitler Gang (1944); It's a Wonderful Life (1946); The Virginian (1946); Easter Parade (1948); The Pirate (1948); Summer Holiday (1948); In the Good Old Summertime (1949); Father of the Bride (1950); Father's Little Dividend (1951); Too Young to Kiss (1951); Give a Girl a Break (1954); The Long, Long Trailer (1954); Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954); Gaby (1956); A Certain Smile (1958); The Diary of Anne Frank (1959); Five Finger Exercise (1962).

Plays (all with Albert Hackett): Up Pops the Devil (1931); Bridal Wise (1932); Thanks for the Memory (1938); The Great Big Doorstep (1942); The Diary of Anne Frank (1955).

The husband and wife writing team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett produced

some of the most enduring screenplays of the 20th century, including The Thin Man (1934), Lady in the Dark (1944), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Father of the Bride (1950), and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). They also collaborated on five plays, most notable among them, The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), for which they won the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the American Theater Wing's Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award. In 1959, they turned the award-winning play into a screenplay.

Frances Goodrich was born in Belleville, New Jersey, in 1891 and started an acting career after graduating from Vassar College. In 1924, while appearing in George Kelly's long-running play The Show Off, she met Albert Hackett, who was also appearing on Broadway. The two met again doing summer stock and produced their first collaboration, a comedy called Western Union, which showcased in Skowhegan, Maine, in the summer of 1930. The partnership flourished, and they enjoyed minor success with two subsequent comedies, Up Pops the Devil (1930) and Bridal Wise (1932), both of which had respectable runs in New York. Meantime, Goodrich had divorced her husband, the historian Henrik Willem van Loon, to marry Hackett, and in 1931, the couple moved to Hollywood to write for films.

By 1939, they had 13 movies to their credit, many of which were box-office hits. The team was well-known for their ability to produce dialogue and mannerisms suited to the particular actors playing their scripts, a talent that was especially evident in The Thin Man (1934), based on a Dashiell Hammett murder mystery, and costarring William Powell and Myrna Loy as the sophisticated Nick and Nora Charles, private eye and wise-cracking wife. The characters proved so popular that Goodrich and Hackett produced several sequels. In 1935, the couple received the first of their five Academy Award nominations for their adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! Their most enduring movie collaboration was It's a Wonderful Life (1946), starring Jimmy Stewart, who claimed it was his favorite movie role.

The husband and wife collaboration, according to Goodrich, was fairly confrontational. The two worked in a room with separate desks facing away from each other. After each had written their version of a scene, they exchanged drafts, then mercilessly critiqued each other's effort before undertaking the arduous task of rewriting. "I never knew there could be so many battles about little words," Goodrich said. Only once did she attempt to collaborate with someone else, but found that she spent so much time trying to spare the other person's feelings that little got accomplished.

The Diary of Anne Frank , two years in the writing, was a labor of love for the couple. They wrote eight different versions of the play, which was adapted from Frank's diary, and visited Otto Frank, Anne's father, to share with him the work in progress. With the play's director Garson Kanin, they also visited the garret in Amsterdam, Holland, where the Franks hid from the Nazis. In reviewing the play, which first starred Susan Strasberg in the role of Anne, The New York Times' theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it "a delicate, rueful, moving drama." In a forward to the published version of the play, he wrote: "The reader of the diary is hardly aware of what the Hacketts have done, the craftsmanship and writing are so unobtrusive.… Written in a subdued key, without pointing a moral, it chronicles the plain details of a strange adventure.… [T]hey have not lost the glow of Anne's character." The couple's last effort was the screenplay for Five Finger Exercise (1962), after which they retired from writing. Frances Goodrich died in 1984, at the age of 93.