Arthur Laurents
1917–2011
New York City, New York, USA
actorwriter
Arthur Laurents was a gay American playwright, screenwriter, and director born in New York City in 1917. He wrote the stage books for two of Broadway's most enduring musicals, West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959), and the screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), Anastasia (1956), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), and The Way We Were (1973), winning two Tony Awards over a seven-decade career. While writing Rope — whose central pair of killers he and others have long read as a coded gay couple — Laurents was involved in a passionate, on-and-off romance with the film's star, Farley Granger. His deepest and longest relationship was with actor Tom Hatcher, his partner for 52 years, from 1954 until Hatcher's death in 2006. Laurents wrote candidly about his gay relationships, including those with Granger and Hatcher, in his 2000 memoir, Original Story By. He died in Manhattan in 2011 at age 93.
