(Bringing together the rich characters and wry humor of a ...)
Bringing together the rich characters and wry humor of a celebrated Texas scribe, this book collects three of Foote's most recognized plays. In these works, Foote deftly combines the claustrophobia of the Southern families from Tennessee Williams, the physical and psychological dysfunctions of Eugene O'Neill's families, and the humor and pathos of small-town Southern life portrayed by Flannery O'Connor.
(In The Trip to Bountiful, Carrie Watts is determined to e...)
In The Trip to Bountiful, Carrie Watts is determined to escape a cramped, unpleasant life in a small Houston apartment with her son and avaricious daughter-in-law. Her burning desire is to return to the now desolate town of her childhood, against the inexorability of change and the refuge of memory. Foote earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1985 for his work on Bountiful.
(Houston businessman Will Kidder and his wife Lily Dale st...)
Houston businessman Will Kidder and his wife Lily Dale struggle to cope with their grown son's suicide and the secret kept by their son's former roommate.
Horton Foote was an American playwright and screenwriter.
Background
Horton Foote was born on March 14, 1916, in Wharton, Texas, United States. He was the son of Harriet Gautier "Hallie" Brooks and Albert Horton Foote. His younger brothers were Thomas Brooks Foote, who died in aerial combat over Germany, and John Speed Foote.
Education
Student, Pasadena Playhouse School Theatre, California, 1935. Student, Tamara Daykarhanova School Theatre, New York City, 1939.
Career
His plays are elegies, tracing the slow but profound course of passing time and the accompanying sense of personal loss. Their surface is, typically, the placid gentility of small-town Texas, but just beneath is the relentless pressure that time, circumstances, and surroundings bring to bear on human happiness. Equal importance is attached to catastrophic events, such as war, and to the details of family life. Foote's style can be described as quietly earth-shattering.
He began his theatrical career in the 1930's as an actor at the Pasadena Playhouse. He later moved to New York City and appeared in numerous productions, including Ernest Hemingway's The Fifth Column. While in New York, he helped to found the American Actors Company and began writing plays for the company in 1940.
His early work includes Texas Town (1941), Only the Heart (1942), Out of My House (1942), Two Southern Idylls (1943), and Celebration (1948).
During the 1950's and early 1960's, Foote wrote and adapted numerous television plays for the Philco-Goodyear Playhouse, Playhouse 90, and the U. S. Steel Hour. One of his first teleplays was The Trip to Bountiful (1953) with Lillian Gish, which was later made into a stage play and, in 1985, a film.
The Trip to Bountiful is the story of a poor elderly widow who quietly rebels against oppressive living conditions and the unreasonable demands of her tyrannical daughter-in-law. Leaving the apartment she shares with her son and his shrewish wife, she embarks on a sentimental journey to her childhood town of Bountiful. But once there she discovers that the old town is desolate, bereft of the inhabitants she once knew, its buildings crumbling and derelict. She is forced to bow to the inescapability of change and make peace with her family.
Dissatisfied with the direction of the theater in the 1960's, Foote withdrew to New Hampshire and wrote a cycle of nine plays entitled "The Orphans' Home Cycle. " The cycle has its roots in the history of Foote's own family. Most of the plays have been produced on stage; 1918 (1985), On Valentine's Day (1985), and Courtship (1986) have also been filmed. In 1962, Foote wrote the screenplay for Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird, and in 1966 his own novel, The Chase, was adapted into a screenplay by Lillian Hellman. He also wrote the screenplay for Tender Mercies (1983), a film about a country-and-western singer recovering from the alcoholism that has destroyed his marriage and his career. Relying on the "tender mercies" of God (a reference to Psalm 79:8) for his strength and health, he finds a new life in a small Texas town. Foote's other works for the stage include The Roads to Home (1982), The Road to the Graveyard (1985), and Blind Date (1986), The Habitation of Dragons (1988), Night Seasons (1993), and Laura Dennis (1995).
Foote was married to Lillian Vallish Foote. Their four children are actors Albert Horton Foote III and Hallie Foote, playwright Daisy Brooks Foote, and director Walter Vallish Foote. All have worked on projects with their father.