Catherine Turney

Catherine Turney
Born	December 26, 1906 Chicago, Illinois
Died	September 9, 1998 (aged 92) Sierra Madre, California
Occupation	Screenwriter, writer
Nationality	American
Years active	1930s–1970s

Catherine Turney (December 26, 1906 – September 9, 1998) was an American writer and screenwriter born in Chicago, Illinois active from the 1930s to the 1970s. She was one of the first women writers to become a contract worker at Warner Brothers, where she worked from 1943–1948 on films such as The Man I Love, A Stolen Life, and My Reputation.

Turney and her parents, George W. and Elizabeth Blamer Turney, moved from Chicago to Rome, New York where she spent most her of her childhood. In 1921, they moved to Pasadena, California where she studied short story writing and playwriting at the Columbia School of Journalism.

In the summer of 1926, Turney started working at the Pasadena Playhouse's School of Theatre where she helped Gilmore Brown prepare for the premiere of Eugene O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed. She later became the director of the Playhouse Workshop and received a scholarship for the School of Theatre where she graduated in the first class of 1931.

In the 1930s, she had early success in theatre with her plays Bitter Harvest (1936), performed in London, and due to the work's positive reviews and thinking she was English and not American, she was offered a job from MGM. She then worked on the film The Bride Wore Red (1937) which was an adaptation of Ference Molnr's unproduced play, The Girl from Trieste, which was later handed to another screenwriter, Joe Mankiewicz. Turney and Waldo Salt, her co-writer, were not given screen credit for the film, but Turney later stated that the film "turned out to be an awful turkey called The Bride Wore Red."

After Bitter Harvest and her experience at MGM, she returned to play-writing and penned My Dear Children (1939), her greatest stage success, which was performed on Broadway and starring John Barrymore. The play was performed 117 times and would have been performed more if Barrymore hadn't grown tired of it.

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