Lawrence B. Marcus

Lawrence B. Marcus, screenwriter: born Beaver, Utah 1917; twice married (one son); died Los Angeles 28 August 2001.

Lawrence B. Marcus was nominated for an Academy Award for one of his later screenplays, The Stuntman (1980), after a long career as a writer for radio, film and television.

Among his most notable scripts were those for Justine, Petulia (selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 best films of 1968) and a television adaptation of Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution. He collaborated with the actress Rosalind Russell in fashioning the story for the first film to star Esther Williams after she gave up her swimming roles, and besides his Oscar nomination he earned during his career a Writers Guild of America Award and a Golden Globe.

Born in Beaver, Utah, in 1917, Marcus grew up in Chicago. He began writing radio scripts while serving with the Army Air Force during the Second World War and, after spending time in London, Rome and South Africa, settled in Los Angeles. One of his early films was Backfire (1950), a complex thriller which made prodigious use of flashbacks in its account of a young man (Gordon MacRae) who sets out to prove his best friend (Edmund O'Brien) innocent of murder. Marcus provided the original story and collaborated with Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts on the screenplay for the film, entertainingly directed by Vincent Sherman with a cast including Virginia Mayo, Dane Clark and Viveca Lindfors. In those early days the writer was billed as Larry Marcus.

One of his radio plays, a tense thriller, Cause for Alarm, was filmed by Tay Garnett in 1951 starring Loretta Young as the wife terrorised by a psychotic husband who plans to kill himself in such a way that she will appear to be his murderer. Marcus also wrote the original story for a superior tear-jerker, Paula (1952), directed by Rudolph Mate and again starring Young as a college professor's wife who teaches a young boy, struck dumb after being run down by a car, to talk again, while hiding the secret that she is the guilty driver.

Rosalind Russell had often provided uncredited contributions to the scripts of her own films, but the only time she received billing as a writer was on the film she wrote with Marcus. Russell recalled, "A young man named Larry Marcus and I had an idea for a story about a schoolteacher who's attacked by one of her students." She added,

I had fun with Larry Marcus. So that we could concentrate without a thousand interruptions, I finally dragged him off to the Hotel Del Coronado, down at the beach, and sequestered him there until we'd finished our story. I knew we'd never get it done otherwise. We spent a week working and I only let him go to his room to sleep. About five o'clock every afternoon I'd take him out on the beach and walk him up and down – it was winter – like he was a puppy. "This is all you get, Larry, this air," I'd say. "Breathe in a lot of it, because after dinner we start work again."

Russell had conceived the tale as a vehicle for herself, but it was ultimately sold to Universal, who filmed it in 1956 with Esther Williams as the teacher who is stalked by an outwardly shy and sensitive pupil (John Saxon). Russell said, "The picture was called The Unguarded Moment. I wish I could tell you it was Gone with the Wind." Later Marcus was to have a less congenial collaboration with the rock star Jim Morrison, for whom he wrote a script only to have the singer destroy it.

William Conrad's Brainstorm (1965), an eerie thriller in which a scientist (Jeffrey Hunter) feigns insanity after killing the husband of his sweetheart (Anne Francis), was based on an original story by Marcus, and was one of the last films to bill him as Larry. In 1969 it was as Lawrence B. Marcus that he took on the job of translating Lawrence Durrell's labyrinthine novels The Alexandria Quartet into a viable film script – over the previous 12 years several writers, including Joseph Mankiewicz, had tried and given up. Though George Cukor's film Justine (1969) received a mixed reception, it was considered that Marcus had made a commendable attempt at compression.

The following year he wrote Petulia. The film featured on several of the decade's 10-best lists and is one of those movies which now define (for better or worse) the Swinging Sixties. Based on the novel Me and the Arch Kook Petulia by John Haase, it starred Julie Christie and was flashily directed at a hectic pace by Richard Lester. Deemed "brilliant" by the film historian Leonard Maltin, it was described by the critic Pauline Kael as "trash in the latest, up-to-the-minute guise", and Marcus himself almost abandoned the script:

I finished the first 35 pages and sent them off to Richard with a letter telling him that this was silly, that I didn't like the pages and that I quit. I got an immediate wire from him: "Love the pages; hated the letter; work".

Among Marcus's other films were Going Home (1971), the study of the relationship between a father and son (Robert Mitchum and Jan-Michael Vincent) when the father returns from a 13-year jail sentence for killing the boy's mother, Alex and the Gypsy (1976), an offbeat romance starring Jack Lemmon and Genevieve Bujold, and The Stuntman (1980), for which he received his Oscar nomination. Completed in 1978 by the producer-director Richard Rush, who then had to wait two years to get the film released, the flamboyant black comedy featured a remarkable bravura performance by Peter O'Toole as an obsessive film director and brought Marcus the best notices of his career.

Most of his later work was for television. In the 1980s, he taught screenwriting at New York University. His wife Viva Knight said that his final screenplay was The Homesman, written for Universal and Paul Newman in the early 1990s, when Marcus was in the early stages of Parkinson's disease.

Tom Vallance