Horton Foote

The award-winning playwright who was an American Chekhov

Horton Foote

1916–2009

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“I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them, to kill them, to break their spirit,” Horton Foote once said. “And yet something about them retains a dignity.” These were the people whom Foote, who died last week at 92, wrote about for more than 60 years. His poignant renderings of homespun struggles won him two Oscars and a Pulitzer, and his deft depictions of how major life changes can turn on quiet moments drew many comparisons to the work of Anton Chekhov.

“Although Foote never really left small-town Texas on the page,” said the Chicago Tribune, “he left it in life at a young age.” At 16, he departed his hometown of Wharton, intent on becoming an actor. In New York, “he ended up in a theatrical improvisation class taught by the legendary Agnes DeMille.” In her young pupil, she saw a budding playwright. “‘Write about what you know,’ she said, and that’s what I did,” he recounted. In 1944 Foote made his Broadway debut with Only the Heart, about a young woman from rural Texas who moves to Houston. Nine years later, in The Trip to Bountiful, “he wrote of the straightforward desire of an old lady to visit the place of her birth one last time before she dies.” Made into an acclaimed 1985 film with Geraldine Page, it was “rich with empathy and generosity, yet mindful of the perils of aging and its forced dependencies.”

Foote’s characters were often far more complex than they first seemed, said The New York Times. “His settings and those who inhabit them often exude an easy familiarity, a sense of folks who have long ago made their nests in a cozy corner of the world.” But inevitably, hidden conflicts emerge. Foote himself said he was concerned with “dislocation, sibling rivalries, family estrangements, family reconciliation, and all the minutiae that make family life at once so interesting and yet at times so burdening.” Such was the case with his script for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as well as for Tender Mercies (1983), about a recovering alcoholic country singer redeemed by the love of a Vietnam War widow. Both films garnered screenwriting Oscars for Foote.

Although Foote wrote more than 80 plays, TV dramas, and movies, “he was never widely embraced in the manner of Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams,” said The Washington Post. During the 1960s and ’70s, when experimental theater and ripped-from-the-headlines dramas reigned supreme, “his subtle approach to storytelling was considered unfashionable.” But he persevered and, in 1974, began his acclaimed nine-play “Orphans’ Home Cycle,” based on the lives of his family. Foote also won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his play The Young Man From Atlanta, about a Houston couple in the 1950s “trying to comprehend the mysterious death of their son.”

Foote’s most recent triumph was last fall’s Dividing the Estate, about a Texas family fighting over an inheritance. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing,” he said when he was 83. “I’d write plays even if they were never done again. You’re at the mercy of whatever talent you have.”

Foote’s wife of 47 years, Lillian, died in 1992. Their four children all worked with him at one point—two are actors, one a playwright, and one a director.