See also: Williams

Thomas Lanier Williams , known as Tennessee Williams , born on March 26th, 1911 with Colombus in the Mississippi in the United States, dead on February 25th, 1983 with New York, is an American writer whose many works were carried to the cinema.

Biography

Tennessee Williams, if not was forgotten, at least forsaken when he died, only, in the New Yorkean hotel room where he lived, one month before its sixty-twelfth birthday. However, this writer, especially known as playwright (although he also wrote some novels, news and poems), leaves a work which made the round the world tour, on the scenes of theater but also on the cinema displays, a great number of his parts having been adaptées.
Thomas Lanier Williams (it took the pseudonym of Tennessee in homage to his grandparents which lived in this State, with Memphis) was born with Columbus (the Mississippi), on March 26th 1911, and passed its childhood, with his mother and her Rose sister, whom it adored, in his/her grandfather, Pasteur. His/her father, whom he hated, was sales representative, therefore almost always absent. In 1937, it breaks with its family when schizophrenic Rose, , undergoes a Lobotomie which leaves it very decreased (it dealt with it when, come success, its financial means was sufficient). It leaves to the Orleans News then to New York, where it exerts various small trades, barman with gatekeeper. The night, it starts to write parts in an act. When the United States enters in war, it is reformed because of its psychiatric file, its homosexuality, its alcoholism, its cardiac disorders and nerveux.
In 1943, it goes to Hollywood, engaged by the Metro Goldwyn Mayer to make the film adaptation of a novel to success. This task annoys it and he writes his own scenario, that the MGM refuses. He makes of it a part, the Menagerie of glass - where he puts in scene his mother and his sister - rise in New York in 1945. With this part, Tennessee Williams knows, at thirty-four years, a sudden celebrity.
She is confirmed two years later with the success of a tram named Désir , whose Elia Kazan is the director, and who marks the beginnings of a young actor of the Actor' S Studio: Marlon Brando . In twenty-four years, nineteen parts of Tennessee Williams were created with Broadway.
Most known are and Fume (1948), the Rose tattooed (1950), Camino Real (1953), the She-cat on an extreme roof (1955), the Descent of Orphée (1957), Soudain last summer (1958), Doux Bird of youth (1959), the Night of the iguana (1961). The majority were played in France where the theater of Tennessee Williams is appreciated. It is Jean Cocteau which adapted a tram named Désir , and Francoise Sagan Doux bird of youth . With the cinema, the largest realizers of its generation, Joseph Mankiewicz with John Huston, signed the adaptations.
All the theater of Tennessee Williams, where one sees the influence of Faulkner and D.H. Lawrence, is crossed by misfits, the marginal ones, losers, disabled, to which all its interest goes, as he explains it in his Mémoires , published in France in 1978. Through all these characters, in a mixture of realism and dream, in the disaster or imagination, it carries out a remarkable analysis of the loneliness, which was the constant of its life.

Poet, novelist ( the Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone , 1950), it described in its plays of marginal, preys of frustrations and excesses of the company.

Tennessee Williams gained the Prix Pulitzer for a tram named Désir in 1948 and for the She-cat over an extreme roof in 1955.

The writer attended during several years the island of Key West in Florida, where it had a house. He was also president of the jury of the Cannes festival 1976.

Partial bibliography

Plays

• the Menagerie of glass ( The Knell Menagerie ), 1944;

• a tram named Desire ( has Streetcar Named Desire ), 1947;
• the tattooed Rose ( The Pink Tattoo ), 1950;
• the She-cat on an extreme roof ( Cat one has Hot Tin Roof ), 1955;
• Descent of Orphée , 1957;
• Suddenly last summer ( Suddenly, Last Summer ), 1958;
• the Night of the iguana ( The Night off the Iguana ), 1961.
• Twenty-seven trailers full of cotton
• Memories of an old crocodile (autobiography)

Others

A song will be dedicated to him. Something of Tennessee written by Michel Berger and interpreted by Johnny Hallyday will leave in 1985.