Johnson, Nunnally

American screenwriter.

Screenwriter, producer, director.

Nunnally Johnson was born on December 5, 1897, in Columbus to Johnnie Pearl Patrick and James Nunnally Johnson. His father worked as a superintendent for the Central of Georgia Railway, and his mother was an activist on the local school board. An avid reader with an acute sense of humor, Johnson grew up and attended school in Columbus, his mother's hometown. In later life he remembered fondly his youthful days delivering on his bicycle the Columbus Enquirer-Sun, attending theatrical productions at the Springer Opera House, and playing first base on the high school baseball team. Johnson later recalled the YMCA building, an ornate marble structure built in 1903 with funds donated by George Foster Peabody, as his "social club." After graduating from Columbus High School in 1915, Johnson worked briefly as a reporter for the Columbus Enquirer-Sun before moving to Savannah to work for the Savannah Press. He continued to visit Columbus annually until his father's death in 1953. In 1919 Johnson moved to New York City and by the mid-1920s had emerged as one of the city's leading newspapermen, reporting major national events for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1919-25), the New York Herald Tribune (1926), and the New York Evening Post (1927-30). At the Evening Post, he also penned a weekly column of humorous social commentary under the heading "Roving Reporter." From 1925 to 1932 he published some fifty short stories in the Saturday Evening Post and several stories in the New Yorker. These writings were mostly light satirical pieces depicting contemporary manners and mores in New York City and in a fictionalized version of Columbus that he called Riverside. Three of his stories won O. Henry Memorial Awards in the late 1920s. In 1931 he published a collection of his stories, There Ought to Be a Law. In 1932 Johnson moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked as a screenwriter for Twentieth Century Fox. Among the dozens of scripts he wrote, he excelled at converting novels into screenplays. His most successful efforts included screenplays for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and The Moon Is Down (1943); The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956), both of which starred Gregory Peck; Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel (1952); and his final screenplay, The Dirty Dozen (1967). He worked in other genres as well. Among his most popular productions were the musical Rose of Washington Square (1939) and the comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), one of actress Marilyn Monroe's earliest films. By the 1950s he was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. Two of Johnson's most important adaptations were of Georgia-based stories: Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1941), his third partnership with the director John Ford, and The Three Faces of Eve (1957), based on a true case of a Georgia woman with multiple personality disorder. That film, which Johnson also produced and directed, earned an Academy Award for actress Joanne Woodward, a Thomasville native, in her first starring role. In 2006 the Writers Guilds of America, east and west, named Johnson's adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath on their list of the 101 greatest screenplays. New Georgia Encyclopedia. (http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1520&sug=y) Retrieved 1/11/2010.

Jimmy Starr had careers as a screenwriter, gossip columnist, publicist, and press agent. Internet Movie Database. (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0823535/bio) Retrieved 1/11/2010.

Joanne Woodward, a Georgia native, is an Academy Award-winning actress and activist. She and her husband, Paul Newman, are among the most well-respected actors of the twentieth century. Joanne Gignilliat Woodward was born on February 27, 1930, to Elinor Trimmier and Wade Woodward in Thomasville, where her father was a school administrator. In the late 1930s the family moved to Marietta. Her mother worked at Bell Bomber, and her father became a traveling salesman. She attended Marietta High School before the family moved again, in 1945, to Greenville, South Carolina. Her older brother, Wade, would later work for Bell Bomber before becoming an architect. As a child, Woodward shared with her mother a great interest in movies. In 1939 she and her mother attended the premiere of Gone With the Wind in Atlanta. After the family moved to Greenville, Woodward began acting in the local theater, the Greenville Little Theatre, and received good reviews. She graduated from high school in 1947, and although a drama teacher encouraged her to move to New York City to pursue an acting career, her father insisted that she go to college instead. She attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and majored in drama but left school after two years and returned home. Only when her father saw her perform in Tennessee Williams's play The Glass Menagerie was he convinced that she had real talent; he then allowed her to pursue acting in New York. Relocating to New York City, Woodward joined the Actors' Studio and Neighborhood Playhouse. She worked with the distinguished dramatic coach Sanford Meisner, who told her that she must lose her southern accent. Woodward started out with small modeling jobs and bit parts in television. In 1952 she was introduced to another young actor, Paul Newman, by the agent that represented them both. Shortly thereafter, they were both cast in William Inge's play Picnic, she as an understudy and he in a small part. Woodward moved to California in 1955 to take on her first major film role in the Hollywood western Count Three and Pray. She next appeared in the films A Kiss before Dying (1956) and The Three Faces of Eve (1957). In the latter, she plays a real-life (but anonymous) Georgia woman plagued by multiple personality disorder, a demanding role that required her to switch constantly between the three very different personalities that her character manifested. The film was written and directed by Georgia native Nunnally Johnson. Woodward won the Academy Award for her performance in March 1958, just two months after marrying Newman, who had himself emerged as a major star by that time. The couple eventually had three daughters, Elinor Terese ("Nell"), Melissa Stewart, and Claire Olivia. Both Nell and Melissa have worked as actors. New Georgia Encyclopedia. (http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1518&sug=y) Retrieved 1/11/2010.