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The Times (06/May/2006) - Obituary: Jay Presson Allen

The Times (06/May/2006)

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Jay Presson Allen -- Screenwriter with a gift for adapting novels and plays for film who specialised in memorable female characters

Jay Presson Allen helped to create some of the most memorable female characters in the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, including the opinionated Edinburgh schoolteacher Jean Brodie, Sally Bowles in Cabaret (1972) and the disturbed heroine in Marnie (1964), one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most controversial films.

Hitchcock hired her to bring a female perspective to the drama, after sacking Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain, who had scripted Hitchcock’s The Birds. Presson Allen was in her forties and her credits were limited to an out-of-print novel, a few television shows, one unproduced play and another that was still to open.

But her career was about to take off. Her stage adaptation of the novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (obituary, April 17) was to prove a hit and she later turned it into a screenplay. Vanessa Redgrave starred in the original 1966 West End production and Maggie Smith won a Best Actress Oscar for the 1969 film.

A few years later Liza Minnelli won the award for her performance as Sally Bowles. At a time when female film writers remained rare in Hollywood, Presson Allen established herself as a leading women’s writer and worked with Barbra Streisand on both Funny Lady (1975) and her update of A Star is Born (1976).

She was born Jacqueline Presson in Forth Worth, Texas, in 1922, and grew up in San Angelo, where her father ran a department store. She wanted to be an actress, but switched to writing and her first novel Spring Riot was published in 1948, but made little impact.

Early attempts to become a playwright were even less distinguished. She could not persuade anyone to stage her first play, a comedy called The First Wife. However her attempts led to a meeting with Lewis Allen, the film and theatre producer, who became her second husband in 1955. A previous marriage had been short-lived.

She worked largely in television. But, although the world of theatre showed no interest in The First Wife, Paramount bought the screen rights and it was filmed as Wives and Lovers (1963) with Shelley Winters, Van Johnson and Janet Leigh and a memorable Bacharach and David title song.

The novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was first published in 1961 and was set in a private school in Spark’s home town of Edinburgh in the 1930s. Jean Brodie was a dangerous mixture of liberal social attitudes and right-wing politics.

It was unlikely source material for an adaptation by an unproven Texan writer. Hitchcock was sufficiently impressed with the play — in written form, for it had not yet been staged — that he hired Presson Allen on the strength of it and the two became very close, to the point where he apparently discussed his impotence with her.

Evan Hunter, her predecessor on Marnie, had had serious problems with a storyline in which the kleptomaniac heroine (Tippi Hedren) is effectively raped by a hero (Sean Connery) who catches her stealing and offers her the choice of marriage or arrest. But Presson Allen had no such qualms and Marnie Edgar is one of Hitchcock’s most intriguing female characters.

The film was not well received on initial release, but has benefited from critical reassessment. It is one of Hitchcock’s most complex films and embraces many of his recurring themes, including suppressed childhood trauma, adult psychological problems, false identities and beautiful blondes.

Presson Allen credited Hitchcock (and his wife) with teaching her the craft of film-writing and they worked together on his pet project, an adaptation of the J. M. Barrie ghost-story play Mary Rose. Presson Allen wrote the script, while Hitchcock toured Scotland scouting locations, but the film was never made.

It was the success of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie — in the West End, Broadway and on film — that really established Presson Allen as a writer with a gift for female characterisation and for adaptation.

Cabaret evolved from a series of short stories by Christopher Ishwerwood into a play and then a stage musical, before arriving on Presson Allen’s desk, although she and the director, Bob Fosse, radically reworked it for the film version. At around the same time she worked on an adaptation of Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt for Katharine Hepburn, though it was Maggie Smith who ended up in the starring role.

Funny Lady was the first of two films in succession for Streisand. It was a sequel to Funny Girl, the 1968 Oscar-winner about legendary Broadway star Fanny Brice, and was produced by Ray Stark, who was married to Brice’s daughter. Their tempestuous relationship inspired Allen to write the novel Just Tell Me What You Want (1975).

Presson Allen wrote the script for a 1980 film version, starring Alan King and Ali McGraw. It was the first of three films she did with the director Sidney Lumet. The second was Prince of the City (1981), in which a policeman (Treat Williams) agrees to provide evidence against corrupt colleagues. It brought Presson Allen a second Oscar nomination; the first was for Cabaret. Her third film with Lumet was Deathtrap (1982), which was adapted from an Ira Levin play and starring Michael Caine.

Several performers in her Broadway plays won Tony awards, including Zoe Caldwell in Jean Brodie (1968), Julie Harris in Forty Carats (1968-70), and Robert Morse for Tru (1989-90), a one-man show based on the work of Truman Capote that Presson Allen wrote and directed.

She had a special gift for reshaping material for a different medium, and she created characters with a depth that appealed to actors with lines they relished delivering.

Her husband predeceased her. She is survived by their daughter.

Jay Presson Allen, screenwriter and playwright, was born on March 3, 1922. She died on May 1, 2006, aged 84.

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