In Remembrance: Mary Orr

     Mary Orr, the stage actress and writer whose short story was adapted into the Academy Award winning film All About Eve (1950), has passed away on September 22, 2006 in New York City. She was 94.

     Born on December 21, 1910 in Brooklyn, NY, Orr was raised in Ohio and attended Syracuse University for two years before studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York City. Throughout her career as an actress, she worked solely on the stage. In collaboration with Reginald Denham, a British film director who emigrated to the United States in the early 1940s, Orr co-wrote numerous Broadway and off-Broadway plays. The couple’s first collaboration, the comedy Wallflower, was brought to the big screen by Warner Brothers Studio in 1948. Orr and Denham, who had married a year earlier, were two of the four writers ultimately credited on the film.

     In addition to acting and playwriting, Orr penned short stories for a number of popular magazines. But it was her first published work, the short story “The Wisdom Of Eve,” that would earn Orr her biggest fame. The story was inspired by a true incident that actress Elisabeth Bergner, which she related to Orr. While Bergner was performing in the stage play The Two Mrs. Carrolls in 1943 and 1944, she hired a young fan as an assistant with whom she soon came into conflict. Written in just four days, Orr took Bergner’s story and made the fan a more ruthless character. The story was published in Cosmopolitan in 1947.

     Two years later, the story came to the attention of writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz who was developing a screen story featuring an aging actress. He pursuaded 20^th Century Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck to purchase the story in order to combine the two into a screenplay which would become All About Eve. Orr never received a screen credit for her story, though Mankiewicz would win an Academy Award for the screenplay.

     “The Wisdom Of Eve” was later adapted into the Tony award winning musical Applause which starred Lauren Bacall.

     Orr would also write for the 1952 television series Mr. & Mrs. North and contributed an episode to the anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.