William Luce
Playwright who wrote The Belle of Amherst and Barrymore
WILLIAM LUCE, who has died aged 88, was an American playwright and scriptwriter who specialised in solo shows and was best known for The Belle of Amherst (1975), a portrait of the reclusive Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson, which became a signature role for Julie Harris.
The actress premiered the role on Broadway in 1976, winning a Tony Award, then reprised the role in London the following year to enthusiastic reviews, before taking the work on tour. Her recording of the play earned her a Grammy in 1978 and in 1986 it was adapted into a film for television starring Claire Bloom.
But not all Luce’s work crossed the Atlantic so successfully. Barrymore, a play about the 1930s matinee idol John Barrymore, set in 1942 when the actor was struggling – through a haze of drink and debt – to recreate his great stage performance as Richard III, earned Christopher Plummer a Tony when he premiered the role on Broadway in 1997, one critic observing that “Plummer bestrides the script like the Colossus he is.”
The actor reprised the role in an eponymous film adaptation, directed by Erik Canuel, in 2011.
When Tom Conti took the play, retitled One Helluva Life, on tour in Ireland and the UK in 2002, however, his performance was praised, but views on the play itself were mixed. One critic described it as “by far the funniest play I have seen in the past few years” and another reported that it left his tummy muscles aching.
Others, however, complained that the script was “little more than a lengthy stand-up routine that leans heavily on the enormous charisma of its lead for support” while the show was “so low in energy and tension that it’s difficult to stop the mind from wandering”.
William Luce was born on October 16 1931, in Portland, Oregon. After studying piano at college he became a professional pianist and organist and worked in the 1960s as a backing singer for performers such as Julie London. He also published poetry and it was probably this that inspired the stage director Charles Nelson Reilly to ask invite him to write The Belle of Amherst.
It was the first of three plays Luce wrote for Julie
Harris, the others being Lucifer’s Child (1991), about the Danish writer Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), for which she received a Tony nomination, and Brontë, (1982), about Charlotte Brontë, which she premiered in Ireland, and which was turned into a television film.
Luce wrote several screenplays for television films, including The Last Days of Patton (1986, with George C Scott and Eva Marie Saint), and The Woman He Loved (1998, starring Julie Harris, Olivia de Havilland and Jane Seymour).
Other solo shows for the stage included Zelda, an account of the doomed Zelda Fitzgerald in a mental home the afternoon before she died in a mysterious fire (later adapted and renamed The Last Flapper), which premiered off-broadway in 1984.
In 1998 it was put on at the Man in the Moon in Chelsea with Tania Mathias in the title role, the Spectator’s critic, Sheridan Morley, finding himself irritated by Zelda’s “wittering on about the days when all the world was young and in Paris”.
Lillian, charting the 30-year relationship of the American dramatist Lillian Hellman with the thriller writer, Dashiell Hammett, ran on Broadway in 1986, when it starred Zoe Caldwell, and was staged in the West End the same year, in a production directed by Corin Redgrave.
According to one critic, Frances de la Tour played the role of Hellman with “self-lacerating precision”, but judged the production “sluggish”.
Luce was predeceased by his partner, Ray Lewis.