Mark Handley is an American playwright and screenwriter known for Idioglossia, a play adapted into the 1994 film Nell. His writing explores isolation, language, communication, and the tension between individual experience and social expectations. He has also taught screenwriting in the Seattle area.
Background
Mark Handley was born on March 5, 1956, in Hollywood, California. He later lived in Chicago before moving with his wife, Dottie, to a remote area of Washington's Cascade Mountains in the late 1970s. The couple built and lived in a log cabin north of Leavenworth for approximately six years, an experience that became an important source for his later writing about isolation, communication, and intimate relationships.
Handley's interest in private language also drew on a reported case involving twins in San Diego who developed a form of speech understandable only to themselves. He combined that subject with his own experience of rural isolation in developing the characters and themes of Idioglossia.
Education
Handley graduated from New Trier High School East in 1974. The school is part of New Trier Township High School District 203 in suburban Chicago and is known for its long-established college-preparatory tradition.
His later writing developed through theatrical work and professional screenwriting rather than through a documented university degree in the available biographical record. Idioglossia was preserved in University of Washington theater collections and was also performed at Oberlin College in 1989, placing the play within the repertory and educational theater networks through which new drama circulated in the United States.
Career
Handley began his public career as a playwright. His play Idioglossia was documented in the mid-1980s and received productions in American theaters, including a 1987 staging at the New Playwrights' Theatre in Washington, D.C., a 1989 production at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles, and a 1989 production at Oberlin College. The drama centers on a woman raised in extreme isolation whose private language challenges the assumptions of scientists, psychologists, and other observers. Its treatment of language, identity, and human connection established the central concerns of Handley's dramatic work.
The play became the basis for Nell, a 1994 feature film directed by Michael Apted. Handley and William Nicholson shared screenplay credit, while Handley's play provided the source material for the film. Produced by Jodie Foster's Egg Pictures and starring Foster, Liam Neeson, and Natasha Richardson, Nell brought Handley's exploration of isolation and communication to a wider film audience.
Handley later worked in the Seattle area's educational and theatrical communities. He taught screenwriting at the University of Washington and participated in local theater instruction and direction, including directing a 2008 production of On the Razzle at Ballard High School. In 1994 he was also developing The Education of a New Pioneer, a screenplay based partly on the long-term work of building a relationship rather than pursuing an idealized notion of love.
Handley's play Idioglossia received productions in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Oberlin, and other American theater settings during the 1980s and 1990s, establishing him as a dramatist working at the intersection of language, psychology, and social isolation.
He co-wrote the screenplay for Nell with William Nicholson, adapting his play Idioglossia into a 1994 feature film directed by Michael Apted and produced by Jodie Foster's Egg Pictures.
(Handley co-wrote the screenplay with William Nicholson, a...)
1994
Views
Handley's documented comments and dramatic work focus on communication as a defining human activity and on the ways isolation can shape identity. Idioglossia treats private language as both a barrier and a form of selfhood, while Nell extends the subject into a conflict between social integration and the preservation of an individual's distinctive inner life.
His account of living in a remote cabin led him to reflect on the distractions that can prevent people from communicating with one another. In discussing The Education of a New Pioneer, he rejected the idea that lasting love depends primarily on a perfect first encounter, describing durable relationships as something constructed gradually through shared life.
Connections
Handley married Dottie Handley. Their life together in a remote Cascade Mountains cabin during the late 1970s and early 1980s provided material for his later writing about isolation, communication, and the construction of long-term relationships.
Wife:
Dottie Handley
She shared Handley's move from Chicago to the Washington Cascade Mountains and lived with him in the log cabin that influenced his later writing.
