1. Philip Jerome Quinn Barry was an American dramatist best known for his plays Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, which were both made into films starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
16 Facts About Philip Barry
1. 2.
Philip Barry was born on June 18,1896, in Rochester, New York, to James Corbett Barry and Mary Agnes Quinn Barry.
3.
Philip Barry's play The Youngest, written when he was 28, is an autobiographical account of his family history following his father's death.
4.
In 1910, at the age of 14, Philip Barry discovered that a New York State interpretation of his father's will entitled him to a share of his father's estate that eventually left him the entire business.
5.
Philip Barry was determined to strike out on his own and, knowing that he wanted to be a writer, enrolled in George Pierce Baker's playwriting course "47 Workshop" at Harvard University.
6.
In 1919, when Philip Barry returned from London, the Yale Dramatic Club staged his one-act play Autonomy.
7.
Philip Barry's first full-length play for the class was A Punch for Judy, written in the spring 1921.
8.
One person who was not happy with Philip Barry's success was a classmate in Baker's seminar, Thomas Wolfe, who struggled to be a playwright before finding fame as a novelist.
9.
In 1927, a year after the birth of his second son, Jonathan Peter, Philip Barry took his family to France.
10.
Philip Barry lived in luxury on the Riviera for a year in a circle that included Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Cole Porter, and Archibald MacLeish, and began work on two new plays.
11.
Philip Barry then strove to write a crowd-pleaser, Cock Robin, with Elmer Rice, whom he had met on his European trip en route to Cannes.
12.
Hotel Universe lasted for only eighty-one performances and added to the financial woes of the Theatre Guild, the famed organization of which Philip Barry was an original member.
13.
Philip Barry teaches her the "science of the emotions," and her outlook evolves.
14.
Hepburn, a close friend of Philip Barry, had appeared in the play on Broadway, but she had doubts about its commercial possibilities and, proven wrong by its box-office success, bought the movie rights with the help of her ex-boyfriend Howard Hughes.
15.
Philip Barry successfully restarted her previously flagging Hollywood career with the film version.
16.
In 1949 at the age of 53, Philip Barry died of a heart attack in his family apartment on Park Avenue.