Few 20th Century playwrights had the same impact as Tennessee Williams, who became a legend thanks to the likes of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, Sweet Bird of Youth” and “The Night of the Iguana. Now he’s in line for a biopic, with Deadline reporting that John Lahr’s book, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, is set to be the basis of a movie about the writer.
Broad Green Pictures is developing the movie, although it’s early days as now writer or director is yet attached.
As Deadline notes, ‘Williams, who was born in Mississippi, was a frail and sickly child whose alcoholic father was constantly on him to become stronger. When he got a little older in high school, he began to write and started winning awards for his essays. He decided to become a journalist and went to University of Missouri’s Columbia Journalism School before dropping out and moving back home to St. Louis where his father put him to work at a shoe factory. The tedium drove him over the edge and he suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of 24.
‘When he got back on his feet, he wrote his first play at Washington University (Wash U) in St. Louis and then ended up in New York, and that is when his career as a playwright took off. He also found love with his assistant Frank Merlo. Even though they had split up, Williams took care of Merlo until he lost his battle with lung cancer. Behind the scenes he took care of his schizophrenic sister with royalties from his plays. But like father, like son, and Williams became an alcoholic and led a life embracing addiction. He died at the age of 71.’
What that doesn’t mention is Williams difficulty and ambivalence about his sexuality. He ‘shocked’ many by repeatedly bringing gay themes into his plays, being one of the first to expose them to the mainstream. However his plays showed that as in life he spent many years deeply unhappy about being gay and wishing he could rid himself of it, treating it as a vice that would destroy him.
As it is so early in the process, we may never see the movie, but Williams is definitely a figure who deserves a biopic.
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