WGA to honor writer Foote with Laurel
It is the union's highest honor.
"Horton Foote, in an astonishing volume of work, continues to this day to show us characters whose vulnerability and dignity in the face of crisis gives us all a minor image of the human spirit," said WGAW president Del Reisman.
"There is no past to Horton Foote. His body of work is in midpassage -- decades of audiences have seen his intimate stories and decades will continue to see them."
Born in Wharton, Texas, Foote began his career with aspirations to be an actor. He initially studied at the Pasadena Playhouse in the mid-1930s and then went to New York where he worked in off-Broadway houses. As a member of the American Actors Theatre, Foote decided to try his hand at writing plays.
In 1940, his theater group staged two of Foote's plays, the one-act "Wharton Dance" and the three-act "Texas Town," the story of a small-town's decay played out in conversations overheard by the town's pharmacist. The latter received critical praise from Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times and Foote's career as a writer was launched.
Two years later, he wrote and directed "Out of My House," which went on to a short run on Broadway. Foote went on to write dozens of plays, but by the end of the 1940s had also turned his attention to television.
In 1953, he wrote "The Trip to Bountiful" for NBC's Television Playhouse, which was broadcast live starring Lillian Gish.
While he went on to adapt the work for the stage (it ran on Broadway for only 39 performances that same year), it wasn't until he adapted it for the screen, in 1985, that the work received its biggest acclaim. His work was nominated by both the AMPAS and the WGA.
His first screen credit came in 1955 for "Storm Fear," an adaptation of a Clinton Seeley novel, but his big break on screen came in 1962 when he adapted Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird." For his efforts, he won both an Oscar and a WGA award.
Other films included: "The Chase" (1966, with screenplay by Lillian Hellman based on Foote's novel and play); "Baby, The Rain Must Fall" (1965, based on his play "The Traveling Lady"); "Hurry Sundown" (1966, co-written with Thomas Ryan); and "Tomorrow" (1972).
