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The Guardian (05/May/2006) - Obituary: Jay Presson Allen

(c) The Guardian (05/May/2006)

Jay Presson Allen

Writer of screen adaptations true to the original's essence

Jay Presson Allen, who has died aged 84, made her name as one of the finest adaptors of plays and novels to the screen. "The trick in adapting," she once remarked, "is not to throw out the baby with the bath water. You can change all kinds of things, but don't muck around with the essence."

This she did with her most skilful adaptations: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1966), her hit stage version of Muriel Spark's celebrated 1961 novel, and her screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964), Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) and Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City (1981).

Based on a pulp novel by Winston Graham, Marnie, one of Hitchcock's most bizarre psychological/sexual thrillers, was Allen's first screenplay. "Hitch taught me more about screenwriting than I learned in all the rest of my career, and I think of his flair for visual shorthand whenever I get verbose," she recalled. "I think one of the reasons that Hitch was fond of me, and filmed a lot of the stuff I wrote, was that I am frequently almost crippled by making everything rational. There always has to be a reason for everything. And he loved that."

Allen made something rational out of the title character (played with icy conviction by Tippi Hedren), a sexually repressed kleptomaniac with a hysterical fear of thunderstorms and the colour red. The opening sequence has a delicious irony when the boss, whom Marnie has robbed of $9,967, describes the thief to police in meticulous detail. "Five feet five. A hundred and ten pounds. Size eight dress. Blue eyes. Black, wavy hair. Even features. Good teeth." The cop chuckles. "What's so damn funny? There's been a grand larceny committed on these premises! I knew she was too good to be true. Always pulling her skirt down over her knees as though they were a national treasure."

Perhaps it was Jean Brodie that prompted Hitchcock to hire Allen for one of his few films to revolve around a female character. Allen had turned Muriel Spark's novel into a wonderful display piece which was grabbed with relish by Vanessa Redgrave in London in 1966, Zoe Caldwell on Broadway two years later, followed by Maggie Smith winning the Oscar in the 1969 film. Allen also contributed to the 1978 TV series, starring Geraldine McEwan as the iconoclastic Scottish teacher.

Born Jacqueline Presson in a small town in Texas, the daughter of a department store manager, she had "no education to speak of" although she attended Miss Hockaday's School for Young Ladies. She moved to New York in the early 1940s, where she married "the first grown man who asked me". After the marriage ended in divorce, she started to make a living by writing scripts for television as well as having a novel, Spring Riot, published in 1948. In 1955, she changed her name to Jay Presson Allen when she married the theatre and film producer Lewis M Allen.

Her unproduced first play, The First Wife, was made into the film Wives and Lovers (1963), starring Janet Leigh and Van Johnson. After Jean Brodie, Allen had another success on Broadway with Forty Carats (1968), her bright version of the French boulevard comedy by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, with Julie Harris as the 42-year-old who has an affair with a much younger man.

In the Brodie line, there were further strong roles for idiosyncratic women in films: Maggie Smith in Travels with My Aunt, based on Graham Greene's comic novel, and Lisa Minnelli (best actress Oscar) as Sally Bowles in Cabaret (both 1972). For the former, Allen and director Bob Fosse wisely jettisoned most of the stage musical, remaining closer to Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye To Berlin stories, and making the male lead (Michael York) blatantly homosexual.

Uncharacteristically, Allen co-wrote (with director Sidney Lumet) the screenplay for Prince of the City (1981), an almost all-male picture, based on The True Story of a Cop Who Knew Too Much, a non-fiction book by Robert Daley. According to Allen, "Male characters are easier to write. They're simpler. I think women are generally more psychologically complicated. You have to put a little more effort into writing a woman."

Male characters (played by Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve) dominated Lumet's Deathtrap (1982), which Allen adapted from the Ira Levin play, and her last work was Tru (1989), a one-man show with Robert Morse's Tony-award winning performance as Truman Capote.

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