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Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman was a famous American playwright born in New Orleans. Three of her most famous plays were The Children's Hour, which deals with the destruction caused by a false accusation of a lesbian affair between two schoolteachers; Little Foxes, about a woman struggling for wealth and freedom in the early 20th century South; and Toys in the Attic, set in New Orleans following the Great Depression about two sisters taking care of their ne'er-do-well brother. Hellman won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and received two Academy Award nominations. She had a long-term relationship with writer Dashiell Hammett and was blacklisted for not revealing communists known to Hammett.

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679 views1 page

Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman was a famous American playwright born in New Orleans. Three of her most famous plays were The Children's Hour, which deals with the destruction caused by a false accusation of a lesbian affair between two schoolteachers; Little Foxes, about a woman struggling for wealth and freedom in the early 20th century South; and Toys in the Attic, set in New Orleans following the Great Depression about two sisters taking care of their ne'er-do-well brother. Hellman won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and received two Academy Award nominations. She had a long-term relationship with writer Dashiell Hammett and was blacklisted for not revealing communists known to Hammett.

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Alexander Driskill

Introduction to Theatre
Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Three of her famous plays include;


• The Children’s Hour
○ It is a drama set in an all-girls boarding school run by two women, Karen Wright and
Martha Dobie. An angry student, Mary Tilford, runs away from the school and to
avoid being sent back she tells her grandmother that the two headmistresses are
having a lesbian affair. The accusation proceeds to destroy the women's careers,
relationships and lives. The
• Little Foxes
○ The focus is on Southern aristocrat Regina Hubbard Giddens, who struggles for
wealth and freedom within the confines of an early 20th century society where a
father considered only sons as legal heirs. As a result, her avaricious brothers
Benjamin and Oscar are independently wealthy, while she must rely upon her sickly
husband Horace for financial support.
• Toys in the Attic
○ Set in New Orleans following the Great Depression, it focuses on the Berniers sisters,
two spinsters nearing middle age who have sacrificed their own ambitions to look
after their ne'er-do-well younger brother Julian, whose grandiose dreams repeatedly
lead to financial disasters. When he unexpectedly returns home accompanied by his
emotionally unstable, childlike young bride Lily, her aloofly aristocratic mother
Albertina, and an unexplained large sum of money, Carrie and Anna suddenly find
the position of power they always have held becomes unbalanced, leaving their lives
in chaos.

Three of her accomplishments


• New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Watch on the Rhine.
• Academy Award Nominations for the screenplays The Little Foxes (1941) and The North
Star (1943)
• In 1993, Cakewalk, a play based on Hellman’s relationship with Peter Feibleman, premiered
at the American Repertory Theatre

Three Personal Facts


• In fall of 1930, she met Dashiell Hammett, a murder-fiction writer, with whom she remained
intimate until his death in 1961.
• Married to Arthur Kober (1925-1932)
• Hellman was blacklisted by the HUACC for not revealing the names of other communists
that knew Dashiell.

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