John William Van Druten

Background

John Van Druten was born on June 1, 1901, in London, England. He was the son of Wilhelmus Van Druten, a Dutch banker, and Eve Van Druten, a Londoner of Dutch parentage.

Education

Van Druten attended University College School in London, (1911 - 1917). He also received the LL. B. from the University of London in 1923.

Career

Van Druten wished to make a career of writing, but his father insisted upon an immediately practical profession, and Van Druten chose the law. For five years, he worked in a London law firm. Finding that he preferred the academic side of the profession to practice, he was a special lecturer in English law and legal history at the University College of Wales, in Aberystwyth, from 1923 to 1926.

During his years of legal training, Van Druten had been striving to establish himself as a writer by contributing to Punch and other periodicals. His first play, The Return Half, was produced by the Ex-Students' Club of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1923, with the then-unknown John Gielgud in the leading role. His next play, Young Woodley, established him as a professional playwright. The work had been banned by a British censor on the grounds that it disparaged the English public school system; brought to New York, it had a successful Broadway run in 1925 but was not produced in London until 1928.

Van Druten turned this play into his first novel, under the same title (1929). Following this success, Van Druten made a lecture tour of the United States, to which he would make many more visits before settling in California; he became a naturalized citizen in 1944.

From the late 1920's to his death, Van Druten had equally successful careers as playwright, screenwriter, and director, but his three later novels A Woman on Her Way (1930), And Then You Wish (1936), and the partially autobiographical The Vicarious Years (1955) added little to his stature. He once estimated his successes in the theater at about fifty percent of his prolific output.

The following decade saw the staging of Leave Her to Heaven (1940) and Old Acquaintance (1940) before Van Druten had a major critical and popular success in The Voice of the Turtle (1943), a play about a soldier on a weekend visit to New York City that neatly captured a wartime mood. I Remember Mama, based on stories by Kathryn Forbes about a Norwegian-American family, was a hit of 1944; it was followed by The Mermaids Singing (1945), The Druid Circle (1947), and Make Way for Lucia (1948), based on novels by E. F. Benson.

Van Druten remained in top form in his last years, producing a popular comic fantasy, Bell, Book and Candle (1950), and a skillful and moving dramatization of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories, I Am a Camera (1951). Van Druten's Hollywood career, which began with the screen adaptation of Young Woodley (1930), included the scenarios for Night Must Fall (1937), a thriller based on a play by Emlyn Williams; Parnell (1937); Raffles (1939); Johnny Come Lately (1943); and (with others) Gaslight (1944), for which Ingrid Bergman won an Academy Award. A number of his own plays were also filmed. Van Druten directed most of his later works as well as the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I (1951).

For many years, Van Druten lived on a ranch in Indio, California, in the Coachella Valley, where he died at the age of fifty-six.

Achievements

• Van Druten was known for his plays of witty and urbane observations of contemporary life and society.

Works

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  • Three Comedies of American Family Life: I Remember Mama / Life With Father / You Can't Take it With You (The ANTA Series of Distinguished Plays)

    (An anthology of three American plays)

  • Bell, Book and Candle: A Comedy in Three Acts

    (For 3 males and 2 females. Witch Gillian Holroyd casts a ...)

  • The Voice of the Turtle.

    (Different cover artwork. Will ship immediately. Expedited...)

  • I Remember Mama (High School Version) - Acting Edition (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)

    (High School Version. Adapted from Kathryn Forbes' book "M...)

  • Make Way for Lucia (Acting Edition)

    (Based on E. F. Benson's hilarious novels, written in the ...)

  • BEHOLD WE LIVE A Play in Three Acts
  • Old Acquaintance
  • Famous Plays of 1932 - 33

Religion

Before his death, Van Druten had turned to the study of religion, following an accidental injury to his arm that had taken him to a Christian Science practitioner.

Views

Van Druten's best plays were well made, amusing and often touching, and characterized by natural-sounding dialogue that made them favorites of exponents of the realistic school of acting.

His credo, which describes a theater more ambitious than the one he wrote for, is a revealing expression of the questing spirit that was characteristic of him as he grew older and more widely read in philosophical and religious literature.

Quotations: "If the author can still feel a new wonder about life, and its sadness, its humor and fascination, then he will be able to communicate that wonder to the audience, and if his wonder is a keen and new and vivid thing, it will emerge as beauty. I would say that the real wonder, an awareness of standing among great mysteries, is the clue to those plays which have truly moved us. "

"I am still bound by the conventions of the fourth wall, and the pretense that the play really is happening somewhere. That will ultimately change, I think. We shall move forward to another kind of play"

"We have to keep reminding ourselves, jolting our minds and our attention back to the oneness of God and the world, seeing and holding them as one. Of all the things that I have learned in religion, this seems to me the most important one. "

Connections

Van Druten was a lifelong bachelor.

Father:

Wilhelmus Van Druten

Was a Dutch banker.

Mother:

Eve Van Druten