Background
Anna Phelan was born in the United States.
1985
Anna Hamilton Phelan poses for a portrait in Los Angeles, California.
2009
Anna Hamilton Phelan attends the premiere of "Amelia" at The Paris Theatre in New York City.
2009
Mira Nair and Anna Hamilton Phelan attend the after-party for the premiere of "Amelia" hosted by Bloomingdale's and Vanity Fair at Bloomingdale's in New York.
2009
Anna Hamilton Phelan attends the premiere of "Amelia" at The Paris Theatre in New York City.
2009
Anna Hamilton Phelan and Charles Post arrive in the Audi Q7 TDI clean diesel to the "Amelia" Premiere at The Paris Theatre in New York City.
2009
Anna Hamilton Phelan and Charles Post attend the premiere of Amelia at The Paris Theatre in New York City.
120 Boylston St, Boston, MA 02116, United States
Phelan studied theater arts at Emerson College in Boston, where she wrote the screenplay for Mask.
Anna Hamilton Phelan attends the premiere of "Amelia" at The Paris Theatre in New York City.
Anna Phelan was born in the United States.
Phelan studied theater arts at Emerson College in Boston, where she wrote the screenplay for Mask.
Anna Hamilton Phelan did not begin writing for the screen until the age of thirty-six. In her early twenties, she had been an actress and typecast. Growing tired of that kind of role, she married and raised two children, and remained out of show business for ten years.
It was while working part-time in a hospital that Phelan encountered a facially disfigured teenage boy whose dignity impressed her. Later learning that the boy had died, Phelan sought out the boy’s mother and risked her own money to buy the rights to the woman’s story. Phelan then went on to pen the script for Mask. Upon completion, it was sold to a producer and to actress Cher, who, to Phelan’s delight, left a message on her phone proclaiming that it was the best script she had ever read.
After the release of the movie, which was directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starred Eric Stoltz as the boy and Cher as his biker mother, critical opinion was positive.
Phelan’s next big-screen project, after a television movie titled Into the Homeland, was the adaptation of the bestselling memoir by gorilla researcher Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist. Phelan, as she recounted for Wiley, was initially averse to writing a script about gorillas. However, after Fossey’s murder, she took the assignment, even traveling to Africa and sleeping in the cabin next to Fossey’s as part of her research.
It would be eight years before another Phelan feature film script was produced. In Love and War, a true story based on novelist Ernest Hemingway’s brief romance with a nurse when Hemingway was a wounded ambulance driver in World War I, was released in 1996. The screenplay’s pedigree was intricate: Phelan wrote the script with two others, based on a treatment, which, in turn, was based on a book by two authors in collaboration, who used the real-life letters and diaries of the nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, as their foundation.
Phelan has also written the screenplay Girl, Interrupted, a film directed by James Mangold, and Amelia. She also co-produced a film based on her script Chains.
In her screenplays, Anna Hamilton Phelan writes strong female character roles. She feels it to be a responsibility of hers. The National Organization for Women has supported the roles that she has written, calling the roles and the films "very pro-female."
Anna Hamilton Phelan is married to Richard C. Orselli. The couple has two children.