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Arthur Laurents (born July 14, 1918) is an award-winning American playwright, librettist, stage director, and screenwriter. His credits include the stage musicals West Side Story and Gypsy and the film The Way We Were. Contents [hide] 1 Early life 2 Military career 3 Theatrical career 4 Film career 5 Blacklist 6 Memoir Early life Laurents, the son of a lawyer and a former schoolteacher who gave up her career when she married, was born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the elder of two children, and attended Erasmus Hall High School. His sister Edith suffered from chorea as a child, and as a result Laurents always felt protective towards her. His paternal grandparents were Orthodox Jews and his mother's parents, though born Jewish, were atheists. His mother kept a Kosher home for her husband's sake, but was lax about attending temple and observing the Jewish holidays. His Bar Mitzvah marked the end of Laurents' religious education and the beginning of his rejection of all fundamentalist religions,[1] although he continued to identify himself as Jewish.[2] After graduating from Cornell University, Laurents took an evening class in radio writing at New York University. His instructor, a CBS Radio director/producer, submitted his script Now Playing Tomorrow, a comedic fantasy about clairvoyance, to the network, and it was produced with Shirley Booth in the lead role. It was Laurents' first professional credit. The Military career Laurents' career came to a halt when he was drafted into the United States Army in the middle of World War II. Through a series of clerical errors, he never saw battle, but instead was assigned to a base located in a former film studio in Astoria, Queens, where he wrote training films and met, among others, George Cukor and William Holden. He later was reassigned to write plays for Armed Service Force Presents, a radio show that dramatized the contributions of all branches of the armed forces. [4] Theatrical career Soon after being discharged from the Army, Laurents met ballerina Nora Kaye, and the two became involved in an on-again, off-again romantic relationship. While Kaye was on tour with Fancy Free, Laurents continued to write for the radio but was becoming discontented with the medium. At the urging of Martin Gabel, he spent nine consecutive nights writing a play inspired by a photograph of GIs in a South Pacific jungle. [5] The result was Home of the Brave, a drama about anti-semitism in the military, which opened on Broadway on December 27, 1945 and ran for 69 performances. Five years later, his second Broadway production, The Bird Cage, was even less successful, running for only 21 performances. In 1952, The Time of the Cuckoo | ||||
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