Harding Lemay

Harding Lemay (born March 16, 1922) is an American screenwriter and playwright. Born near the Mohawk Indian reservation in North Bangor, New York, where his mother grew up, he ran away to New York City at age 17, where he has lived ever since.

Sometimes credited as Pete Lemay, he is best known for his stint as head writer of the soap opera Another World, from 1971 to 1979. Many family situations and characters were modeled after his own family, such as the Frame brothers and sisters.

He was credited with ratings surges that pushed viewing figures to ten million households, as well as material that earned the series a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 1976. It was his writing that made the characters of Mac Cory (played by Douglass Watson), Rachel Cory Hutchins (Victoria Wyndham), and Iris Cory Carrington (Beverlee McKinsey) household names. However, by 1979, Lemay decided not to continue writing the series for a ninth straight calendar year, and first handed over the reins to a new writer before exiting for good later that year. He also engendered some criticism for writing out three of the show's most popular actors George Reinholt (Steve Frame), Jacqueline Courtney (Alice Matthews Frame), and Virginia Dwyer (Mary Matthews), in 1975.

One of his reasons for leaving was that, first and foremost, writing a serial that aired five times a week proved to be too taxing. In a 1981 interview with PBS, Lemay stated that even mundane occurrences would be ruled by his job. "If I saw a nice dress in the window, my first thought wouldn't be that it would be a nice gift for my wife. I would think, 'That dress would look great on Pat," Pat Randolph being a character on Another World.

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