Oscar-nominated screenwriter whose diverse career included adapting Emma
Douglas McGrath, who has died aged 64, served his time as a screenwriter, actor, novelist, playwright, satirist and film director but when officialdom required him to state his job title he preferred the simple portmanteau of ‘‘storyteller’’.
Some of the stories he told were his own, such as his final work, Everything’s Fine, an autobiographical one-man stage show about his teenage years growing up in Texas, and how a history teacher changed his life in an unexpected way. Others were stories drawn from classic literature which he skilfully reworked for the screen, including his 1996 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s
Emma, starring
Gwyneth
Paltrow in the title role, and his
2002 film of
Dickens’
Nicholas
Nickleby.
McGrath directed both films as well as writing the screenplays. ‘‘One of the joys of being a writer – and it’s a short list – especially if you are adapting things for film, is that you learn to study the structure of great writers,’’ he said. ‘‘You really have to take a book apart and put it back together. One must both honour the book and forget it. The trick is figuring out when to do which.’’
His 2006 film Infamous was a biopic about Truman Capote, while his play Checkers dramatised events in the early political career of Richard Nixon before he became president. He directed the documentary Becoming Mike Nichols, about the late film director, and wrote the book for the Broadway jukebox musical Beautiful, which chronicled the life of the singer-songwriter Carole King.
At times his storytelling involved a whipsmart kind of cosplay, such as his one-man stage comedy Political Animal, in which he played a right-wing presidential candidate.
Some of McGrath’s best stories were told in collaboration, most notably the screenplay for the 1994 screwball thriller Bullets Over Broadway, which he co-wrote with Woody Allen and for which he received an Academy Award nomination. One of Allen’s finest films, it was written while he was battling Mia Farrow in court and facing accusations of child abuse.
McGrath recalled that while they were writing the script their work was constantly interrupted by tense phone calls from his coauthor’s lawyers. ‘‘OK, get a detective,’’ he recalled Allen instructing at one point. They collaborated in other ways, too, and as an actor McGrath appeared in no fewer than seven of Allen’s films, including Celebrity, Small Time Crooks, Hollywood Ending and Cafe Society.
Yet he cited Jane Austen as his favourite collaborator, not least because she couldn’t answer back. ‘‘She writes superb dialogue, she creates memorable characters, she has an
‘‘She writes superb dialogue, she creates memorable characters, she has an extremely clever skill for plotting.’’
Douglas McGrath on why Jane Austen was his favourite collaborator
extremely clever skill for plotting,’’ he said. ‘‘And she’s dead, which means there’s none of that tiresome arguing over who gets the bigger bun at coffee time.’’
Douglas Geoffrey McGrath was born in 1958 in Midland, Texas. His father, Raynsford, was an independent oil producer and his mother, Beatrice (nee Burchenal), worked at Harper’s Bazaar before her marriage and was a friend of Andy Warhol, who gave her several of his artworks.
Leaving Manhattan for the oilrigs and tumbleweeds of the Texan plains was a culture shock for his parents. ‘‘It’s very hot, very dusty, and it’s very, very windy. It’s like growing up inside a blow dryer full of dirt,’’ McGrath later said.
He was educated at Choate Rosemary Hall, a boarding school in Connecticut where former pupils included John F Kennedy. At Princeton he read literature and wrote musicals for the university’s Triangle Club, the troupe with which F Scott Fitzgerald had taken his first steps as a writer. He graduated in 1980 with dreams of a film career but noted that when he attended the career guidance centre not one of the job cards read: ‘‘Needed: writer-actor-director for major feature, no experience required, must be willing to earn high salary.’’
However, a friend told him that NBC’s Saturday Night Live was hiring writers. He submitted some sketches and landed a job at US$850 a week. Unfortunately the show at the time was in decline. Its original stars, including John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, had left and McGrath freely admitted that his time on SNL coincided with ‘‘the worst year in the show’s history’’. He had, he conceded with characteristic self-deprecation, played a part in teaching America that ‘‘it wasn’t such a good idea to hurry home from that party and watch the show’’.
There were further early career disappointments, too. Blockbuster, a 1988 novel co-authored with fellow SNL writer Patricia Marx, flopped, as did the 1993 remake of the 1950 romantic comedy Born Yesterday, to which McGrath contributed the screenplay. He credited the failure with a change of career focus. ‘‘I remember thinking if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life watching someone else muck up what I did, there’s only one way around that: I have to become a director,’’ he said.
As a journalist he wrote satirical columns for The New Yorker, The New York Times and Vanity Fair. During Bill Clinton’s time in the White House he wrote The Flapjack File for The New Republic – a parody about a president who lived on fast food and a conniving first lady called Mrs Rodham Flap. He followed with The Shrub File during the George W Bush era and later lampooned Donald Trump for The New Yorker.
He is survived by his wife, Jane Read Martin, an assistant to Allen on his films Hannah and Her Sisters and The Purple Rose of Cairo. She also acted in McGrath’s comedy Company Man, which he not only co-wrote and directed but also starred in as the husband of Sigourney Weaver’s character. He married Jane in 1995 and they had a son, Henry, who also survives him.
McGrath had been performing in the off-Broadway run of Everything’s Fine in New York. He delivered his final performance the night before he died.