1. Colin Higgins was an Australian-American screenwriter, actor, director, and producer.
23 Facts About Colin Higgins
1. 2.
Colin Higgins was best known for writing the screenplay for the 1971 film Harold and Maude, and for directing the films Foul Play and 9 to 5.
3.
Apart from a brief stint in San Francisco in 1945, Colin Higgins lived in Sydney until 1957, mostly in the suburb of Hunters Hill, attending school at Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview.
4.
Colin Higgins moved to New York and hung around the Actors Studio but could not find work, so he became a page at the ABC television studios.
5.
Colin Higgins lost hope at becoming an actor and enlisted in the US Army, where he was sent to Germany and worked for Stars and Stripes newspaper.
6.
Colin Higgins was discharged in 1965, spent six months in Europe, mostly in Paris, then returned to Stanford University to study a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing.
7.
Colin Higgins wrote a play Once Around the Quad which was performed at Stanford after he left.
8.
Colin Higgins visited Expo 67 in Montreal and was inspired by the film exhibits there and decided to learn about film.
9.
Colin Higgins began working on a Master of Fine Arts in screenwriting at UCLA, where his classmates included Paul Schrader and actor brother Barry Higgins.
10.
Colin Higgins's thesis was the basis for Harold and Maude.
11.
Colin Higgins showed a draft of Harold and Maude to Lewis, who then showed it to Robert Evans at Paramount.
12.
Colin Higgins wanted to direct the script himself and was allowed to shoot a director's test for $7,000 but Paramount was not sufficiently impressed, and Hal Ashby was hired.
13.
Colin Higgins collaborated well with Ashby and both were pleased with the final film, but it was not a large box-office success on original release.
14.
Colin Higgins got an offer to write the screenplay for the TV movie The Devil's Daughter, which he later described as "just a job".
15.
Colin Higgins wrote a TV movie, The Distributor, which was not made, and a feature film script, Killing Lydia, which would later become the basis for his 1978 film Foul Play.
16.
Colin Higgins then received an offer from Jean-Louis Barrault in Paris to turn Harold and Maude into a play for French actor Madeleine Renaud.
17.
Colin Higgins did so, working on the French translation with Jean-Claude Carriere, and the play ran for seven years.
18.
The producers of The Devil's Daughter hired Colin Higgins to write a Hitchcock-style thriller.
19.
The success of Silver Streak enabled Colin Higgins to revive his earlier script Foul Play and direct the film himself.
20.
Colin Higgins was writing the comedy-thriller The Man Who Lost Tuesday when he received an offer to re-write and direct 9 to 5.
21.
Colin Higgins was meant to follow it with The Man Who Lost Tuesday, but Paramount felt the budget was too high and passed.
22.
Colin Higgins, who was openly gay, died of an AIDS-related illness at his home on August 5,1988, at the age of 47.
23.
The "Colin Higgins Foundation" was established in 1986 to provide support for gay and transgender youth.