Orange County Register

Horton Foote, whose gentle, southern-flavored plays and film scripts carved a unique place in the American dramatic landscape, has died.

He was called “the rural Chekhov” by Robert Duvall, who acted in several Foote scripts, including “Tender Mercies.” (Duvall won an Oscar for his role in the film, as Geraldine Page did two years later in “The Trip to Bountiful,” also written by Foote.)

The Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning Texan was born in 1916 in a small town called Wharton. Many of his stories were set there.

Foote came to southern California at 16 to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He later went to New York and tried his hand at acting, but decided playwriting was a way to guarantee himself good parts.

Foote wrote for “Playhouse 90″ and other TV dramas in the 1950s, then went on to win an Oscar for his adapted screenplay of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 1962.

Foote’s plays were featured in Orange County earlier this decade. “Getting Frankie Married — and Afterwards” made its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in April, 2002. “The Carpetbagger’s Children” received its West Coast premiere at SCR less than a year later.

“Sometimes I’m inspired by a character. Other times it’s a story I’ve heard or even a mood that a certain place (evokes). It’s something that baffles me still,” Foote told me in a 2002 interview.

Read my complete interview with Foote:

Horton Foote displays all the charms of a retiring Southern gentleman. With his gentle, patrician bearing, honeyed voice and soft Texas twang, he’s the very picture of a disappearing Dixie archetype.

But don’t let appearances fool you. At an age when most distinguished artists would be content to rest on their laurels, Foote, 86, is as busy as he’s ever been in his long, many-chaptered career as playwright and screenwriter.

“You must forgive me,” he apologizes after the interview’s fourth interruption. “I have a new play going up at Lincoln Center (“Carpetbagger’s Children”), and they’re firing a whole lot of questions at me.”

Foote’s New York premiere is counterbalanced by another debut on the opposite coast. South Coast Repertory is readying his “Getting Frankie Married — and Afterwards” for its inaugural production on the Mainstage. SCR co-founder Martin Benson directs the theater company’s first Foote play. It opens Friday.

Foote is delighted to have a West Coast premiere; his plays are not often staged in this part of the country, and he can’t remember one of his scripts debuting outside of the South or New York. Foote is one of several Southern playwrights who, despite their obvious skills, remain under-appreciated beyond their region. Rebecca Gilman, Romulus Linney, even Lillian Hellman are also members of that august group.

“I wish (my plays) were done more often out there on the professional stages,” he said. “But at this point, it’s something I don’t dwell on.” Foote has been around long enough to know that his career follows its own unpredictable path, its own byways of recognition and obscurity, and it’s best to let that journey be.

Born on March 14, 1916, in Wharton, Texas, Foote has never strayed far, spiritually or creatively, from his small- town Gulf Coast roots. Those familiar with his plays know that fictional Harrison, a frequent setting, is Wharton’s double.

Foote did leave town, though, to pursue his dreams of working in the theater. At first, he tried his hand at acting. After two years of training at the Pasadena Playhouse, he journeyed to New York, where a stint in Tamara Daykarhanova’s Theatre School familiarized the young Texan with the then-trendy Stanislavsky technique and the works of Anton Chekhov, a playwright who was to exert a lasting influence. Actor Robert Duvall describes Foote as “the American Chekhov.”

Others agree with that description. “Like Chekhov, Horton always has compassion for his characters, no matter how badly they behave,” said Kent Thompson, an expert on Southern playwrights who heads the Southern Writers Project and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. “And both (playwrights) are true to their locales. (Foote) has been faithful to certain qualities of the Southern experience — the eccentricity of the characters and this wonderful vernacular that has a unique music to it when you hear it.”
Seduced by Hollywood

Foote’s acting experiences convinced him that writing plays was a sure route to securing decent roles for himself, and he found early success as a playwright. His first full-length script, “Texas Town,” was praised by The New York Times, and one of his early efforts, “Only the Heart,” reached Broadway in 1944.

It was in the ’50s, though, that Foote entered his first period of real fame and success. His two-year stint as a writer for live television dramas on “Kraft TV Theatre,” “Playhouse 90” and other prime- time programs elevated him to the ranks of Rod Serling and Paddy Chayevsky, two of the best writers of the form.

“It was much like writing plays, since everything was live back then,” Foote said. “It was nerve-racking, though. There was nothing you could do if an actor went up on his lines. But it was a very educa tional experience for me.”

The following decade was perhaps the busiest of Foote’s career. He scored notable Broadway successes: “The Traveling Lady” with Kim Stanley, and a staged version of his TV script “The Trip to Bountiful,” starring Lillian Gish. At the same time, Foote’s TV experience gave him entry into Hollywood’s higher echelons. His screenplay adaptation of Harper Lee’s best-selling novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” won Foote an Oscar, and it remains his best-known work.

Foote remembers “Mockingbird” as one of his most enjoyable Hollywood experiences. “I wasn’t even on the set — I wrote (the adaptation) back in Nyack, New York. But everyone shared the same vision and fought hard to get the right kind of film made, especially (producer) Alan Pakula. I think it helped that the studio didn’t seem to care about us too much.”

Foote’s subsequent screenplays were less successful (“Baby the Rain Must Fall,” an adaptation of his play “The Traveling Lady,” and a disastrous experience with “The Chase”), and he left the limelight for several years, moving his family to a quiet corner of New Hampshire.

“Everyone talks about that (period) as a kind of retreat,” Foote said. “I suppose it must have seemed like it to some, but I simply had a lot of ideas for plays that I wanted to write. I’ve always thought of myself as a person of the theater first and foremost, and I wanted to get back to it.”

Indeed, Foote produced much of his best stage work during the following two decades; ironically, much of it has transferred successfully to the screen. His nine-play, semiautobiographical “Orphans Home Cycle” has been a source of screen adaptations. Five of them have been made into movies, including a well-reviewed 1997 Showtime production of “Lily Dale” that featured a first-rate cast: Mary Stuart Masterson, Stockard Channing, Sam Shepard and Jean Stapleton.

More than 20 years after “Mockingbird,” Foote’s screenplay talents were again acknowledged when he won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for “Tender Mercies” in 1983. The script was a gift to longtime friend and admirer Duvall, whose film career began with a small but crucial nonspeaking role as Arthur “Boo” Radley in “Mockingbird.”

Thompson sees “Tender Mercies” as a classic example of Foote’s understated craftsmanship.

“His world is not filled with dramatic incident, but there are all these inner connections that simmer beneath the surface. If you look closely at `Tender Mercies’ or `The Trip to Bountiful,’ the characters take a journey, but it’s as much a journey of the spirit and heart as a real trip.”

The mystery of inspiration

Like most of Foote’s work, “Getting Frankie Married — and Afterwards” is based on people he has known — but as usual, the parallels are not exact.

The story concerns a longtime bachelor named Fred Willis and his eternal girlfriend, Frankie Lewis, whom he has been dating since high school. Though they’re well into middle age, Fred is reluctant to tie the knot. A death bed request from Fred’s mother that he marry Frankie precipitates a crisis, though, and threatens to reveal a secret that Fred would prefer to keep hidden.

Fred is a familiar type around Foote’s Texas hometown. “I’ve known several men like him, who for one reason or another never get around to getting married.” He laughed. “Perhaps it’s a Southern thing. I don’t know.”

As to how he concocts a story for his based-on-reality composites, Foote admits that even after more than six decades as a professional writer, finding the inspiration for a good yarn remains a mystery.

“Sometimes I’m inspired by a character. Other times it’s a story I’ve heard or even a mood that a certain place (evokes). It’s something that baffles me still.”

Foote mentioned a writer whose muse suddenly deserted him after decades of regular, reliable novels. “There’s no telling why or when that might happen,” he said ominously.

Does Foote worry about his own river of creativity drying up? “Oh, I don’t have time to think about things like that,” the playwright said, moments before the interview was interrupted again by questions from his Lincoln Center production team. “I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me. Things are very, very busy around here.”

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