1925: Eve?s Secret (Badger); D?class?e (The Social Exile) (Vignola) (play). 1929: Her Private Life (A. Korda) (play). 1930: Anybody?s Woman (Arzner); The Right to Love (Wallace); Sarah and Son (Arzner); Ladies Love Brutes (R. V. Lee) (story); The Furies (story). 1931: Women Love Once (Goodman); Once a Lady (McClintic); Working Girls (Arzner); Girls about Town (Cukor) (story). 1932: The Greeks Had a Word for Them (Three Broadway Girls) (L. Sherman) (play). 1933: Christopher Strong (Arzner); Morning Glory (L. Sherman) (play). 1934: Outcast Lady (Leonard). 1936: Accused (Freeland); Lady of Secrets (Gering). 1937: Camille (Cukor). 1938: The Toy Wife (Thorpe); Zaza (Cukor). 1939: The Old Maid (E. Goulding). 1947: Desire Me (Cukor and LeRoy). 1953: How to Marry a Millionaire (Negulesco) (co-play). 1958: Stage Struck (Lumet) (play).
1985: Elle ? passe tant director?heures sous les sunlights (Garrel) (role).
Playwright: plays produced from 1915, with much critical attention after success of D?class?e, 1919; 1930?first solo screenplay, Sarah and Son; 1930-31?
Pulitzer Prize (for drama) for The Old Maid,
Humansville, Missouri, 30 October 1886.
Married Hugo Rumbold, 1932 (died 1932).
In Los Angeles, California, 20 October 1958
Zo? Akins is best known as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama for The Old Maid and as a playwright of light comedies and social dramas. Unfortunately she has not been recognized as a screenwriter excelling in adapting plays and novels?her own and several from French and Hungarian sources?to film form. Her woman-centered scripts portrayed feminine consciousness in American and Continental settings with shocking candor and worldly wit. She deftly chronicled her characters? conflicts with shifting social standards within the complete spectrum of comedy, from slapstick farce to sentimental romance to urbane satire. Many of her stage plays, among them D?class?e, Her Private Life, and The Furies, were adapted to the screen by others. Two of her plays, relatively unsuccessful in the United States, were produced abroad: Papa (1919) in Germany and The Human Element (1939) in Hungary. Akins?s ability for dramatic adaptation was the key to her success as a screenwriter.
Her first plays, Papa and The Magical City, were produced by the Washington Square Players in 1919. Akins?s first hit play, D?class?e, portrayed marital infidelity and the consequences of divorce for the wife. It was one of Ethel Barrymore?s most popular vehicles, ?the richest and most interesting play that has fallen to her in all her years upon the stage? (The New York Times). The screen version was titled Her Private Life.
Throughout Akins?s twin careers, her works consistently received mixed reviews, with the exceptions of her hit plays, D?class?e, The Greeks Had a Word for Them, The Old Maid and its film version, and the film Camille. George Jean Nathan attributed to her plays ?grace and humor and droll insight.?
Subsequent to her Broadway productions of the 1920s?Moonflower, Daddy?s Gone A-Hunting, First Love, The Furies, and The Love Duel?Akins earned her first screenwriting credit, with G. Morris and Doris Anderson, for Anybody?s Woman. Next she captured the antics and anxieties of three young models searching for wealthy husbands in The Greeks Had a Word for Them. This very funny and popular comedy also pleased audiences of the film version, which was adapted by Sidney Howard. (The 1953 film How to Marry a Millionaire was based both on the Akins play and Loco, by Dale Eunson and Katharine Albert.) Akins then wrote the screenplay for Women Love Once, based on her play Daddy?s Gone A-Hunting, which was a moderate
When Akins?s most successful play, The Old Maid, based on the Edith Wharton novel chronicling the woes of an unmarried mother and her daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize, many protests were voiced. Enraged New York drama critics formed their own group, the Drama Critics Circle, to give their own awards. Judith Anderson and Helen Menken starred in the play; Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in the film that Akins scripted. Critics rated the film pictorially perfect, the acting superb, and the production nearly flawless.
Writing with Frances Marion and James Hilton, Akins scripted the critically and commercially successful Camille, starring Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor. According to Time the film kept ?intact the story?s inherent emotional vitality.? The Toy Wife and Zaza were rated mediocre successes. Critics faulted Desire Me, written with Marguerite Roberts, for a labored story line that was a variant of the Enoch Arden tale, and for miscast actors.
Akins differed from her Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist peers Zona Gale and Susan Glaspell in two ways. Unlike them, she was essentially a comedic writer; and she wrote for stage and screen simultaneously for two decades. She was considered the best-known woman playwright of her time, achieving the record of 16 plays on Broadway in 16 years. Her reputation rests primarily upon her prolific and lengthy career as a playwright and secondarily upon her success as a screenwriter skilled in adapting literary works to film.?