Award-Winning Playwright and Screenwriter Horton Foote Dies at 92

Horton Foote, the Texas-born playwright and screenwriter who enjoyed a triumphant Broadway opening night last November with his play Dividing the Estate, died on March 4 in Hartford, Connecticut. He would have celebrated his 93rd birthday on March 14.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for The Young Man from Atlanta and two Academy Awards for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies, Foote was equally renowned for his work in film and as the author of 60 plays, many of which were set in a fictionalized version of his hometown.

Albert Horton Foote Jr. was born Wharton, Texas renamed Harrison in his plays, on March 14, 1916. His father was a local haberdasher, and "Little Horton" spent his childhood clerking in his father’s store. Doted on by his extended family, Foote graduated from high school at 16 and set out by bus a year later in the height of the Depression to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He spent a decade as an actor, first in California and then in New York, and eventually began writing sketches inspired by memories of home.

“I don’t think a writer chooses what he is going to write about,” Foote told Broadway.com of basing his work on his relatives, many of whom led fairly dysfunctional lives. “I think it chooses you.” When critic Brooks Atkinson praised the young playwright’s script but not his acting in the 1941 off-Broadway mounting of Texas Town, Foote decided to commit himself to writing.

Though he never stopped writing plays, Foote found Oscar-winning success in the movies, adapting Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird in 1963 and penning the original screenplay Tender Mercies in 1983. A third Oscar nomination came two years later for the adaptation of his best-known play, The Trip to Bountiful, directed for the screen by his cousin, Peter Masterson.

Despite his film success, Foote did not move to Hollywood: He and his wife, Lillian, and their four children playwright Daisy Foote, Dividing the Estate star Hallie Foote, restaurateur Horton Foote Jr. and director Walter Foote made their home in Nyack, NY, and later in New Hampshire. All four children survive him, and were present on stage with their father at the curtain call of Dividing the Estate last November 20.

At the time of his death, the prolific Foote was working to put together “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” a three-part presentation of his autobiographical plays to be produced jointly by Hartford Stage beginning in August and as the 2009-2010 season at Signature Theatre Company. Three of the plays, Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts and Cousins were planned as world premieres, joining Lily Dale, The Widow Claire, Coutship, Valentine’s Day, 1918 and The Death of Papa.

Foote had courtly manners and spoke in a soft Texas drawl to the end of his life, yet his sly wit was evident both in conversation and in the characters he created. His dialogue is notable for the undercurrents of emotion beneath its polite, correct exterior, a quality critics have likened to Chekhov. “He’s influenced by many writers,” his actress daughter Hallie told Broadway.com in an interview for a Backstory feature last fall. “Certainly Chekhov, and a lot of poets. He loves Ezra Pound; he loves Elizabeth Bishop. He loves the stories of Katharine Anne Porter. People have compared him to Beckett—he loves Beckett! He listened to the music of composer Charles Ives a lot when he was working on the ‘Orphans’ Home Cycle.’ It goes all over the map with him.”

At age 79, Foote won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for The Young Man from Atlanta just after Signature Theater Company devoted a season to his work. The next decade brought a flurry of productions in New York—The Traveling Lady, The Day Emily Married, The Carpetbagger’s Children and an acclaimed revival of The Trip to Bountiful starring Lois Smith—that reminded theatergoers of his unique gift for conveying the often heartbreaking ways people search for connections and deal with setbacks.