Horton Foote (playwright)

Born in 1916, Horton Foote left Wharton, Texas to study acting, first in California then in New York. At the suggestion of choreographer Agnes de Mille he began writing plays, dramatizing stories of his hometown, as he would in most of his more than fifty plays. “It’s a very mysterious process, this finding what you want to write about and how it appears and how it urges you to finish it and to go through all the pain,” Foote said in 2005. “I’ve just never had a desire to write about any place else.”

Since his first play, Texas Town, premiered Off- Broadway in 1941, his plays have been produced on Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway and at theaters around the country. In 1995 Foote won a Pulitzer Prize for The Young Man from Atlanta. In 2008, Foote’s Dividing the Estate moved from Primary Stages to Broadway earning a Tony nomination for Best Play. Other plays include The Trip to Bountiful, The Day Emily Married (produced by Primary Stages in 2004), The Old Friends, The Carpetbagger’s Children, The Last of the Thorntons, The Traveling Lady, and The Orphans’ Home Cycle. Foote also occasionally directed his own plays and, in 2000 his daughter Daisy’s When They Speak of Rita at Primary Stages.

Foote was a leading writer of television dramas during its “Golden Age,” working for Kraft Playhouse, Playhouse 90 the Philco-Goodyear Hour, and others. He later won an Emmy for his teleplay The Old Man (1997). His work in film includes Storm Fear (1956), Baby the Rain Must Fall (1964), The Trip to Bountiful (1985), and Of Mice and Men (1992). He received Academy Awards for his adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) and his original screenplay Tender Mercies (1983).

Individual plays in Foote’s epic nine-play The Orphans’ Home Cycle were produced around the country, and film versions were made of Convicts, Lily Dale, Courtship, On Valentine’s Day, and 1918. In 2009 Foote’s re-imagined, three-part The Orphans’ Home Cycle was produced in its entirety at Hartford Stage and then moved to New York’s Signature Theatre, earning Lortel, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics Circle awards.

Foote’s awards include Obie, Outer Critics Circle, Lortel, and Drama Desk Awards, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal, PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award, New York State Governor’s Award and the 2000 National Medal of Arts Award from President Bill Clinton. Foote died in 2009, shortly after finishing his adaptation of The Orphans’ Home Cycle.