ISRAEL HOROWITZ STEVEN APPLEBAUM

WHEN ISRAEL Horovitz was 13, he submitted a novel titled Steinberg, Sex and the Saint to Simon & Schuster. The manuscript was rejected with a letter — penned by someone who didn’t know the aspiring author’s age — praising its “wonderful childlike quality”. That was “the unkindest cut”, says Horovitz, laughing down the line from a hotel in Orlando, Florida.

Undeterred by this early setback, the son of a Massachusetts truck driver went on to become one of modern theatre’s most prolific and performed playwrights. Asked whether writing was a compulsion, Horovitz says no; he saw it “as a way out of town”. “I think if I had been unable to be a writer, if I had been unable to express myself that way, I might have been in jail right now. But thank the Lord I found that at a really early age.”

We are talking because, having had “more than 70 plays produced around the planet”, Horovitz has now turned one of them — the popular, Paris-based chamber piece My Old Lady — into a film, placing him in the director’s chair (in cinema, at least) for the first time. “I needed to do something to scare me”.

My Old Lady was conceived as a love letter to France. However, there wasn’t much of the city in the play and he saw an opportunity to put this right on screen. The result is a blackly-comic drama in which family secrets burst into the open after an American deadbeat (Kevin Kline) inherits a Paris apartment from the father he blames for his problems, only to discover he must pay a monthly sum to the old lady (Dame Maggie Smith) living there with her daughter (Kristen ScottThomas), until she dies.

The play included numerous references to the Nazi occupation of Paris and France’s treatment of the Jews, but these have been left out of the film to sharpen its thematic focus. Horovitz, who was awarded the French insignia of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, in 2012, admits, though, to being