Lillian Hellman Filmography

Born:: June 20, 1905 in New Orleans, LA
Occupation:: Screen Story, Screenwriter, Play Author
Biography:: Lillian Hellman was one of the more popular and influential playwrights of the '30s and '40s. Her dramas were often politically oriented or socially conscious, and frequently centered on taboo subjects such as lesbianism, as in The Children's Hour, or getting away with murder, as in Little Foxes....Read More

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Directed by William Wyler

Actors: William Wyler, Bette Davis, Laurence Olivier, Lillian Hellman, Gregory Peck, Terence Stamp

Synopsis: This excellent biographical documentary looks at the life and work of director William Wyler. The film is dominated by clips from many of Wyler's better-known works, such as Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur, and Funny Girl. A long interview with the director himself (conducted a few days before he died) Read More

1986
Julia

Crew: Screen Story

Actors: Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, Jason Robards, Jr., Maximilian Schell, Hal Holbrook

Synopsis: The film traces the lifelong relationship between playwright Lillian Hellman and Julia, a wealthy girl who turns her back on her upbringing to follow her ideals. In the 1930s, while the adult Hellman (Jane Fonda) struggles to establish herself as a playwright with the help of her lover, Dashiell Hammett Read More

1977
The Chase

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, James Fox, E.G. Marshall, Angie Dickinson

Synopsis: All hell breaks loose in a Texas town when an escaped convict heads home in Arthur Penn's Southern gothic melodrama. Appointed by local kingpin Val Rogers (E. G. Marshall), benevolent Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando) manages to keep the peace in Tarl, but the situation starts to fester one Saturday Read More

1966
Toys in the Attic

Crew: Play Author

Actors: Dean Martin, Geraldine Page, Yvette Mimieux, Wendy Hiller, Gene Tierney

Synopsis: Julian Berniers (Dean Martin ) return from Illinois with his young bride Lily (Yvette Mimieux) to the family in New Orleans. Sisters Carrie (Geraldine Page) and Anne (Wendy Hiller) welcome the couple, who arrive with expensive gifts for the spinsters. The sisters hope brother Julian will help with Read More

1963
The Children's Hour

Crew: Play Author

Actors: Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, James Garner, Miriam Hopkins, Fay Bainter

Synopsis: Based on the 1934 play by Lillian Hellman, The Children's Hour is set at an exclusive girl's school managed by best friends Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. When student Karen Balkin is punished for one of her many misdeeds, the mean-spirited youngster rushes to her wealthy aunt Fay Bainter Read More

1961
Hallmark Hall of Fame: The Little Foxes

Crew: Play Author

Synopsis: Hollywood's archetypal "good woman" Greer Garson pulls off an astonishing about-face as the wicked, scheming Regina Giddens in this 90-minute Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation of Lillian Hellman's 1939 stage drama The Little Foxes. Set in the post-Civil War South, the plot involves the underhanded Read More

1956
Another Part of the Forest

Crew: Play Author

Actors: Fredric March, Dan Duryea, Edmond O'Brien, Ann Blyth, Florence Eldridge

Synopsis: Another Part Of The Forest begins some twenty years before the events of Lillian Hellman's play and movie The Little Foxes and shows how that film's Hubbard family became the ruthless, greedy lot they were. It's fifteen years after the Civil War, and the Hubbards dominate their small Southern town Read More

1948
The Searching Wind

Crew: Play Author, Screenwriter

Actors: Robert Young, Sylvia Sidney, Ann Richards, Dudley Digges, Douglas Dick, Albert Basserman

Synopsis: The troublesome years "between the wars" provide the backdrop for the romantic drama The Searching Wind. Adapted by Lillian Hellman from her own stage play, the film stars Robert Young as Alex Hazen, an idealistic but incredibly naïve US ambassador who fails to heed the warning signals when Read More

1946
Watch on the Rhine

Crew: Play Author, Screenwriter

Actors: Bette Davis, Paul Lukas, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Donald Woods, George Coulouris, Lucile Watson, Beulah Bondi

Synopsis: An expansion of, and improvement upon, Lillian Hellman's stage play of the same name, Watch on the Rhine stars Paul Lukas, recreating his Broadway role of tireless anti-fascist crusader Kurt Muller. As the clouds of war gather in Europe in the late 1930s, Muller arrives in Washington DC Read More

1943
The North Star

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Farley Granger, Ann Harding

Synopsis: In this bit of WWII propaganda (designed to boost support of America's alliance with Russia against Germany), Kolya (Dana Andrews), Kurin (Walter Huston), Damian (Farley Granger), and Marina (Anne Baxter) are members of a farming collective in the Ukraine known as the North Star. The hard-working Read More

1943
The Little Foxes

Crew: Play Author, Screenwriter

Actors: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, Teresa Wright, Richard Carlson, Patricia Collinge, Charles Dingle

Synopsis: Playwright Lillian Hellman first wrote of the horrible Hubbard family in her 1939 play The Little Foxes. In this lavish 1941 film version, Bette Davis takes over for Broadway's Tallulah Bankhead in the role of conniving turn-of-the-century Southern aristocrat Regina Hubbard Giddens. Regina's Read More

1941
Dead End

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea, Humphrey Bogart, Wendy Barrie, Claire Trevor

Synopsis: Adapted by Lillian Hellman from Sidney Kingsley's Broadway play, Dead End concerns itself with several denizens of New York's East River district. Here the elite and the slum-dwellers rub shoulders due to the close proximity of the riverfront tenements with the East Side luxury hotels. Slum girl Read More

1937
These Three

Crew: Play Author, Screenwriter

Actors: Miriam Hopkins, Merle Oberon, Joel McCrea, Catherine Doucet, Alma Kruger

Synopsis: Lillian Hellman's 1934 Broadway play The Children's Hour was such a hot potato that film producer Samuel Goldwyn was denied Production Code permission to use the play's original title. The reason was the story's lesbian theme, a factor that also blocked The Children's Hour from winning a Pulitzer Read More

1936
The Dark Angel

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Fredric March, Merle Oberon, C. Montague Shaw, Charles Tannen, David Torrence, Clare Verdera, Douglas Walton, George Breakston, Colin Campbell, Tom Moore, Louise M. Bates, Roy Darmour, Douglas Gordon, Harold Howard, Albert Russell, Doris Stone, Francis Palmer Tilton, Carl Voss, Herbert Marshall, John Miltern, Vesey O'Davoren, Claud Allister, Jimmy Baxter, Janet Beecher, Jimmy Butler, Robert Carleton, Denis Chaldecott, Fay Chaldecott, Phyllis Coghlan, Cora Sue Collins, Edward Cooper, Henrietta Crosman, Philip Dare, Gunnis Davis, Jack Deery, Vernon P. Downing, Sarah Edwards, Bud Geary, Lawrence Grant, Robert Hale, John Halliday, Sam Harris, Holmes Herbert, Olaf Hytten, Frieda Inescort, Colin Kenny, Claude King, Murdock MacQuarrie

Synopsis: Samuel Goldwyn's The Dark Angel is a sumptuously produced soap opera with a poignant "Enoch Arden" style denouement. Fredric March, Merle Oberon and Herbert Marshall star respectively as Alan Trent, Kitty Vane and Gerald Shannon, friends since childhood. Though Gerald is deeply in love with Kitty Read More

1935