Patrick Kearney (playwright)

Patrick Kearney (October 9, 1893, Columbus, Ohio – March 28, 1933, New York City) was an American playwright.

Kearney started in the theatre as an actor. His first Broadway play as a playwright was the comedy A Man's Man which was moderately successful, opening on October 12, 1925 and running into January of the next year, with 120 performances. It was made into a 1929 silent film of the same name, now lost.

Theodore Dreiser and Horace Liveright chose Kearney to write the stage adaption of Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy and Kearney did so. The play (of the same title), featuring Morgan Farley and Miriam Hopkins, had a successful run on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre in the 1926–1927 season. In 1927, the play initiated Los Angeles's legitimate theatre scene as the premier production of Wilkes' Vine Street Theatre (now the Ricardo Montalbán Theatre).An American Tragedy had a Broadway revival in 1931 at the Waldorf Theatre.

Kearney's play of An American Tragedy was adapted into the 1951 film A Place in the Sun starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, according to a screen credit acknowledging the play as a source. Elizabeth Coons and Deirdre Kearney Rose, Patrick Kearney's widow and daughter, filed a 1959 lawsuit against Paramount Pictures requesting an injunction restraining the distribution of the film. Paramount countered that, the onscreen credit notwithstanding, the film was based solely on Dreiser's novel. The film won the 1951 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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