Fay kanin biography

Kanin went on to write and co-produce the Emmy-winning Friendly Fire ABC, , a heralded TV-movie starring Carol Burnett as a mother who challenges the military to get to the bottom of how her son died in Vietnam. Kanin and Lillian Gallo , who had produced "Hustling", formed a production company in , which yielded Fun and Games ABC , starring Valerie Harper in a tale of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace.

Kanin then wrote Heartsounds for producer Norman Lear , the story of a woman Mary Tyler Moore and her travails as her husband James Garner copes with heart disease which consumes their lives. Kanin made a brief return to Broadway in with the Tony-nominated musical, "Grind", adapted from an unproduced screenplay. Even after her tenure as president of the AMPAS ended in , she remained an articulate industry spokesperson on such matters as film preservation and a social leader.

Spouse Michael Kanin April 6, - March 12, his death, 2 children. Sister-in-law of Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon.

Fay kanin biography

Mother, with Michael Kanin , of film editor Josh Kanin. Fay wanted to write for movies from the age of She grew up in Elmira, New York, where she attended Elmira College, the first college in the country to offer women a degree equivalent to the one they awarded to men. After three years, however, Kanin wanted to finish college in Los Angeles where the movie industry was centered.

In an overwhelming display of support, her parents decided to make the move with her. David went to California ahead of Bessie and Fay to see if he could find a job, and when he was successful, the family relocated. After graduating from the University of Southern California in , Kanin started making the rounds, beginning at Goldwyn Productions, where she was turned away because of her lack of experience.

RKO's story editor, Robert Sparks, was more receptive and hired her as a writer, although three weeks later, when the head of the studio left and the personnel were shifted, she was demoted to script reader. Over the next two years, Kanin made it her business to learn everything she could about the movies. In , a year after meeting, the two married and began a successful writing collaboration as well.

She would later play the lead in a production of her own play Goodbye My Fancy at the Pasadena Playhouse. During the s and s, the Kanins wrote a number of hit movies together, including Rhapsody , and Teacher's Pet , starring Doris Day and Clark Gable , which won an Academy Award and a Writers Guild nomination. The Kanins also wrote two successful plays together, His and Hers and Rashomon , based on stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa , and created the book for the musical The Gay Life There came a time, however, when the collaboration began to strain the marriage, and the two decided to pursue separate screenwriting careers.

Fay had already had a solo success with her play Goodbye My Fancy , which ran for two years on Broadway, and she later found a creative outlet in television. Actors and Comedians. Business Icons. Medal of Honor Recipients. Medal of Freedom Recipients. Musicians and Singers. Nobel Prize Laureates. Sports Figures. Kanin longed to move to Los Angeles to get into pictures and her parents indulged her.

Her father moved to California first to secure a job, then she and her mother packed everything and followed by train. Kanin proceeded to teach herself everything she could about the movie industry at RKO's expense. During the lunch hour, she talked to anyone she happened to find — whether they were art directors, editors, or cinematographers.

There was a small theater at the studio where contract players put on plays. Michael was trained as an artist and had turned to commercial art and painting scenery for burlesque houses to help support his parents during the Great Depression. They were introduced by a mutual friend, and Michael practically asked Kanin to marry him right then and there, but it took her a little while to come around to the idea.

Liebling about a boarding house for boxers, spent the next six months writing its adaptation, Sunday Punch. They knew they were on the track to a partnership when MGM bought the screenplay. Then we divided up the writing, each taking the scenes we felt strongly about. Then one or the other of us would put it all together into a single draft.

We did find a common voice, though we had different strengths. As an artist, Michael brought a great visual sense to the process. I was a people person who loved the characters and the dialogue. Through the collaboration, we learned a lot from each other and about each other. But the time came when I felt as if we were together 48 hours a day.

Writing with someone else always requires some degree of compromise, as does marriage. When it came down to the question of which would survive, the marriage or the writing partnership, it was a pretty easy decision. But I remember that it was a challenge convincing the powers that be that we had been successful writers individually and would be again.

We were hyphenated in people's minds: Fay-and-Michael Kanin. To again become Fay Kanin and Michael Kanin took some doing. Michael took a job working with Ring Lardner Jr. Countering existing gender roles, the play made a bold statement about women and their place outside the home. During World War II, Kanin came up with an idea to promote women's participation in the war effort, and presented the idea for A Woman's Angle radio show to the heads of NBC Radio for which Kanin would write the scripts and do the network commentary.

Kanin even made an acting appearance in A Double Life , co-written by her brother-in-law Garson Kanin and his wife, actress Ruth Gordon. But it was the Oscar-nominated script for Teacher's Pet for which they are best remembered, a film about a self-made newspaper editor Clark Gable who has a love-hate relationship with journalism teacher Doris Day.

The film almost did not get made since the Kanins were not under any studio contract, and having shopped the script around without attracting any interest, it was only after a rewrite inspired by Garson Kanin 's Born Yesterday that producer Bill Perlberg and director George Seaton purchased it. It was ridiculous, but it was very real, and there was nothing we could do about it.

We took a larger mortgage on the house and started writing a play, but we didn't work in films for almost two years. They were unable to find work again until director Charles Vidor insisted that MGM hire the couple for Rhapsody in In the couple adapted Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon for the Broadway play of the same name ; with a further adaptation for the screen, in Martin Ritts The Outrage.

In the early s, Kanin began solo writing in earnest with Heat of Anger , about a strong, older woman lawyer played by Susan Hayward and a younger male lawyer. At first, Kanin was put off by the lack of an immediate reaction from an audience, but once she realized that more people had seen it in one night than would have seen it in theaters if it played for a year, she was hooked and wrote five more films for television.

Tell Me Where it Hurts started from a small newspaper article about a group of women in Queens who got together to just talk. The film starred Maureen Stapleton and won two Emmys. The following year, she wrote and co-produced Hustling based on Gail Sheehy 's non-fiction book. The film was about a prostitute recounting her life to a reporter, and starred Jill Clayburgh and Lee Remick , respectively.

For weeks, Kanin interviewed working girls at the Midtown North police station, and after the film aired, she received letters complimenting her on how fairly she had treated them.