Marcelle Maurette

Marcelle Maurette
Marcelle Maurette in 1937
Born	14 November 1903 Toulouse
Died	24 October 1972(1972-10-24) (aged 68) 16th arrondissement of Paris
Occupation	Playwright Screenwriter

Marcelle Maurette (1903-1972) was a French playwright and screenwriter who is particularly well known for her play Anastasia (1952) which brought her international recognition, and inspired a film of the same name. It is not her only play centred on a woman with a tragic story. Many other works of hers feature historical or fictional heroines with dramatic lives. She was honoured with various awards and was a prominent French literary figure.

Marcelle Marie Joséphine Maurette was born in Toulouse to General Georges Maurette and Marie-Louise Donbernard, on 14 November 1903. (See ‘Birthdate notes’ section lower down page.) She was educated at St. Nom de Jésus, Toulouse, Cours Bouchut, Paris, and the Convent of the Filles de Notre Dame, Limoges. The painter Ingres was her great-great-uncle.

She began writing as a teenager: short stories, articles and poems, for which she won prizes. In 1931 she married Count Yves de Becdelièvre who would later write a book about her: Marcelle Maurette, ma femme: journal de sa vie, 1903-1972. She was energetic and outgoing, enjoying socialising with her upper-class friends as much as her theatre and cinema work.

In 1937 Maurette began to concentrate on writing plays, and in 1942 stopped working as a journalist and reviewer as she took up screenwriting too.

In the 1930s, when her theatrical work began to flourish, more French women than ever before were being recognised for their talent as dramatists and seeing their plays performed on the Parisian stage. Maurette was part of a contemporary move away from "literary" plays towards theatricality. Often she chose to portray "exceptional women" with "tragic lives". In this she was supported by the director Gaston Baty who rejected literary theatre while also avoiding naturalism, and staged four of her plays:Madame Capet, Manon Lescaut, Marie Stuart and Neiges. One critic believes that working with Baty helped Maurette find the right direction for her work.

The peak of her career came in the 1950s as a result of writing Anastasia. This play quickly moved beyond France to six other European countries and to the USA. An English translation/adaptation by Guy Bolton (1952) was staged in England by Mary Kerridge and John Counsell, then in 1953 shown on television where Vivien Leigh saw it and recommended it to her husband Laurence Olivier for a London production at the St. James's Theatre. It opened in New York on Broadway at the Lyceum in early 1955. In 1956 the play was presented at the Falmouth Playhouse in Massachusetts with the Mexican actress Dolores del Río and continued with a tour of seven other theaters throughout New England. Then, after bidding in competition with Warner and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,20th Century Fox bought the rights for the 1956 film version of Anastasia with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, for "more than £20,000".