Zoe Akins in 1907.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00086FGV4/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002C1DZVQ/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001U2BUJM/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VNBET2/?tag=2022091-20
Zoe Byrd Akins was born on October 30, 1886 in Humansville, Missouri, United States. She was the second of three children of Thomas Jasper and Sarah Elizabeth Green Akins. Her family was heavily involved with the Missouri Republican Party, and for several years her father served as the state party chairman. Through her mother, Zoe Akins was related to prominent figures like George Washington and Duff Green.
Zoe was sent to Monticello Seminary in nearby Godfrey, Illinois for her education and later Hosmer Hall preparatory school in St. Louis. While at Hosmer Hall she was a classmate of poet Sara Teasdale, both graduating with the Class of 1903.
Akins started writing plays when she was only twelve. Her play Papa, a comedy in three acts, toured the country before its brief, twelve-performance stint at the Little Theater in New York City in 1919. By the time Papa reached New York, Akins had already seen the Washington Square Players perform her one-act verse melodrama The Magical City at the Bandbox Theater (1915/16 season).
Akins first tasted success with the play Déclassée, a society drama produced in 1919 at the Empire Theater and starring Ethel Barrymore. Barrymore played Lady Helen Haden, who calls herself “the last of the mad Varricks” and believes in living recklessly; it was one of Barrymore’s most popular roles. The play, which explores the effects of divorce on a woman, draws from trashy magazine romances as well as the writings of Elinor Glyn and Saki. It was adapted to screen as Her Private Life in 1929.
Akins won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for drama for her play The Old Maid, adapted from Edith Wharton’s novella. Starring Judith Anderson and Helen Menken, it opened at the Empire Theater, New York, in January 1935. In a mixed review, a New York Times reviewer called it “a cautious adaptation rather than a vigorous one.’’ In Books, W. P. Eaton observed that Akins compensated for being unable to present Wharton’s drily humorous prose style “by giving to the two leading actresses opportunities for portraying cool social distinction.” When Akins won the Pulitzer - a highly controversial decision - dissenting critics formed the Drama Critics Circle to present their own awards. Akins also wrote the film version starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins.
Within two years of moving to California in 1928, Akins was under contract to Paramount as a screenwriter. Her first screenplay was Anybody's Woman (1930), for which she shared credit with G. Morris and Doris Anderson.
Akins adapted her own Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting into the screenplay Women Love Once (1931). She also adapted Christopher Strong (RKO, 1933) from the best-selling novel by Gilbert Frankau. The film, featuring Katherine Hepburn (as an aviatrix in love with a manied man) and directed by Dorthy Arzner, was not a great success. Hepburn had fared better in the film based on Atkins’ play Morning Glory, earlier in the same year; she won her first Academy Award for the role of a naive, egotistical young actress from Kansas, eager to become a star in New York. In addition to collaborating on Christopher Strong, director Arzner and writer Akins worked together on Sarah and Son, Anybody’s Woman, and Working Girls (1931).
Akins moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where her first script was Outcast Lady (1934), adapted from the novel The Green Hat (1924) by Michael Arlin. The novel had already been adapted for the screen in 1928 as the silent film A Woman of A ffairs, starring Greta Garbo. In 1936. Akins collaborated on the adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’ Camille. It was an enormous boxoffice success, and was also popular with the critics. Akins then wrote The Toy Wife (1938) for Luise Rainer, who had just won Academy Awards for her performances in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). In The Toy Wife, Rainer plays a frivolous wife in New Orleans in the 1880s.
Cukor described Akins as one of America’s most gifted artists, and the two collaborated on several more occasions. Akins teamed up with Cukor again at Paramount for Zaza (1938), starring Claudette Colbert in the third film version of the play. They also worked together on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of Pride and Prejudice (1940), but Cukor was replaced by Robert Z. Leonard and Akins’ script was rewritten by Aldous Huxley and Jane Muifin. so she was not credited as a writer. After a six-hear hiatus from the screen. Akins collaborated on Desire Me (1947), a Greer Garson vehicle directed by Cukor. Adapted from the novel by Leonhard Frank, it is about a man who pretends his best friend is dead so he can take over his wife and property. Cukor was replaced by Mervyn LeRoy, though neither received screen credit as director.
Akins’ talents as a writer extended to poetry and fiction. She published her first poems in the St. Louis Mirror, and in 1912 collected her poetry in Interpretations: A Book of First Poems.
Akins died in her sleep on the eve of her 72nd birthday in Los Angeles.
Zoe Akins was the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Old Maid (1936) and was known for her comedies in both of her writing careers: she wrote for stage and screen for two decades. Starting in the 1920s, she had sixteen plays on Broadway in as many years. She was skilled at adapting plays and novels for the screen, and several of her plays were made into movies by others. Centered on female characters, and favoring glamorous, elegant settings, her plays and films regarded women’s difficulties and peccadillos with a shrewd, humorous eye.
George Cukor described Akins as one of America’s most gifted artists. A critic for Freeman observed in a review of a collection of three of her plays, Declassee, Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, and Greatness, “She never bends completely to the demands of her plots, and still she lacks the courage to flaunt them entirely”; the reviewer called this tendency “at once her bulwark and her undoing.”
In 1932, Akins married Hugo Rumbold (in the last year of his life). She was rumoured to be in a long-term relationship with Jobyna Howland until Howland's death in 1936.
