60 Fun Facts About Tennessee Williams

What was Tennessee Williams's real first name?

Thomas Lanier Williams III was Tom to his family, and he gave that name to the narrator of The Glass Menagerie, the restless son who stands in for Williams himself.

Despite his pen name, the playwright Tennessee Williams was born in which state?

Mississippi is where he was born and spent his first years, in his grandparents' home; Tennessee was his father's side of the family, and the state whose name he borrowed when he renamed himself as a young writer.

What was the job of Tennessee Williams's father during the playwright's early childhood?

Traveling shoe salesman Cornelius Williams was so rarely home, and drank so heavily, that his wife and children spent the playwright's first years living with her parents.

Which childhood illness nearly killed Tennessee Williams and kept him housebound through a long recovery?

Diphtheria left the once-sturdy boy frail and kept him indoors, where his mother and grandparents read to him by the hour; he came out of it bookish and delicate, to his father's open scorn.

When Tennessee Williams was a boy, his family left the South for which city?

St. Louis ended a small-town childhood he remembered as happy; he hated the city, turned inward and began to write there, and later set The Glass Menagerie in one of its dingy apartments.

Williams's lurid revenge story "The Vengeance of Nitocris" ran in which pulp magazine when he was 17?

Weird Tales printed it in August 1928: an Egyptian queen lures her brother's killers to a banquet in an underground vault, then pulls a lever and lets the Nile drown them.

Why is Williams's father said to have pulled him out of university?

He failed a military training course, the ROTC, in the usual telling, and was put to work as a clerk; Williams wrote through the nights until he collapsed in 1935.

Where did Williams finally graduate with a B.A. in English in 1938?

The University of Iowa: an amateur troupe had staged his early plays, and its director urged him to go there to study playwriting. He finished the degree at 27.

Which foundation gave the struggling young Williams a grant after his one-act plays won a Group Theatre prize?

The Rockefeller Foundation money was no rescue: he went on working odd jobs, from theatre usher to Hollywood scriptwriter, until The Glass Menagerie made his name.

Which late Williams play is set at 722 Toulouse Street, the rooming house where he once rented an attic?

Vieux Carré: he lived in the attic at 27, and the house he called a "poetic evocation of all the cheap rooming houses of the world" now belongs to the museum around the corner.

The Glass Menagerie opened in which city in December 1944, three months before it reached Broadway?

Chicago: bad weather kept early audiences away and the producers considered closing, until critics Claudia Cassidy and Ashton Stevens campaigned for it and built the houses that carried it to Broadway.

Which actress returned from years of near-retirement to play Amanda Wingfield in the original Glass Menagerie?

Laurette Taylor had acted only occasionally since her husband's death in 1928. Her Amanda won special acclaim, and she died in December 1946, four months after the Broadway run closed.

In The Glass Menagerie, what nickname did Jim give Laura in high school?

Blue Roses is what Jim heard when Laura said she had been ill with pleurosis. The name suits her: a flower not found in nature, for the shy girl who prizes a glass unicorn.

What was the working title of The Glass Menagerie while Williams was turning his MGM screenplay into a play?

The Gentleman Caller began as a screenplay he wrote on MGM's payroll in 1943. Reworked for the stage, it made his name, and it was a rival studio, Warner Bros., that filmed it in 1950.

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche rides Desire, changes to Cemeteries and gets off where?

Elysian Fields Avenue: the names are real, and Williams lined them up so that Blanche passes from Desire through Cemeteries to a shabby street that bears the name of Greek myth's paradise for the blessed dead.

From which town does Blanche DuBois travel in A Streetcar Named Desire?

Laurel: Blanche says she is on leave from teaching English there, but she was dismissed over an affair with a 17-year-old student and turned out of the Hotel Flamingo.

What is the name of the DuBois family plantation lost before A Streetcar Named Desire begins?

Belle Reve went to the bank on a foreclosed mortgage, not into Blanche's pocket as her brother-in-law suspects when he cites the Napoleonic Code. She hands him the papers to prove it.

Vivien Leigh played Blanche DuBois on screen, but who created the role on Broadway in 1947?

Jessica Tandy won a Tony for her Blanche, but Hollywood insisted on a film star and passed her over for the 1951 movie, even as her three Broadway co-stars kept their roles.

Which Streetcar character carries the name of a young man Williams met while working in a factory?

Stanley Kowalski was a young man he met in the job his father forced on him, work that left him miserable. Years later the name went to Blanche's brutish brother-in-law.

The 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire won three acting Oscars, but which of its nominated stars lost?

Marlon Brando lost while Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden and Kim Hunter all won. It was the first of four straight Best Actor nominations for him, and the fourth, for On the Waterfront, brought the Oscar.

Whose threat to condemn the finished 1951 film of Streetcar led Warner Bros. to cut it?

The Legion of Decency, a Catholic film-rating body, was about to condemn it, so the studio trimmed a few minutes of film. The footage was restored in 1993.

Which pair led the 1992 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire?

Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange led the revival, and both returned to their roles when it was filmed for television in 1995.

Which star played Maggie "the Cat" opposite Paul Newman in the 1958 film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?

Elizabeth Taylor lost her husband, producer Mike Todd, in a plane crash in March 1958, days after filming began. She came back to finish the role and earned an Oscar nomination for it.

What is Big Daddy Pollitt's business in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?

Cotton planting made him "the Delta's biggest cotton-planter". He is turning 65 and, though nobody has told him, dying, so his sons' wives are manoeuvring over who inherits the plantation.

What word does Brick use in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the lies and liars around him?

Mendacity is why Brick says he drinks. Big Daddy turns the word on him, saying the disgust is really with himself for hanging up when his friend Skipper phoned to confess.

Who played Big Daddy in both the 1955 Broadway and 1958 film versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?

Burl Ives, a folk singer turned actor, took the patriarch from stage to screen. The film came out in 1958, yet the Oscar he won for that year was for a different role, in The Big Country.

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick Pollitt is a fading hero of which sport?

Football made Brick a local idol, and whiskey has replaced it. The play opens the day after he broke his ankle trying, drunk, to jump hurdles on the high-school track as he did in his glory days.

The 1958 film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof dropped which element of the play?

The homosexual angle gave way, under Hollywood's censorship code, to what one reviewer called a complicated business of hero-worship. Williams told a ticket queue the movie would set the industry back 50 years.

Which Williams heroine is the minister's daughter who loves a doctor in Summer and Smoke?

Alma Winemiller: alma is Spanish for "soul", and the play sets her spirit against the appetites of the young doctor. On film in 1961 the part won Geraldine Page a Golden Globe.

Who won an Academy Award for the 1955 film of The Rose Tattoo?

Anna Magnani: Williams wrote the widow Serafina with her in mind, but she did not play it on Broadway. The film, her first Hollywood picture and first English-speaking role, won her Best Actress.

Camino Real is framed as the dream of which literary figure, who falls asleep in the prologue?

Don Quixote dozes off at the edge of a plaza and dreams up a town where Casanova, Camille and Lord Byron are stranded. The fantasy was a commercial failure on Broadway in 1953.

Orpheus Descending (1957) is a rewrite of which earlier Williams play?

Tallulah Bankhead turned down the original, saying "The play is impossible, darling, but sit down and have a drink with me."

What distinctive garment does the drifter Val leave behind at the end of Orpheus Descending?

A snakeskin jacket: a lynch mob tears it off him, and Carol Cutrere keeps it as a sign that his wild spirit survives, the way a snake sheds its skin and lives on.

Baby Doll (1956) drew on two Williams one-act plays: The Unsatisfactory Supper and which other?

27 Wagons Full of Cotton supplied the plot: a gin owner burns down a rival's cotton gin, and the rival gets his proof, and his revenge, by pursuing the arsonist's young wife.

By Carroll Baker's own account, which star was a leading contender for her title role in Baby Doll?

Marilyn Monroe was the rival Baker remembered for the part. By Baker's account she even worked as an usherette at the film's New York premiere, a benefit for the Actors Studio.

Suddenly Last Summer opened Off-Broadway in 1958 on a double bill under what overall title?

Garden District paired it with the shorter Something Unspoken, which was played first. Suddenly Last Summer was the half Hollywood filmed the following year, softened for the censors.

In Suddenly Last Summer, what does Mrs. Venable want done to Catharine to silence her?

A lobotomy was performed on Williams's own sister Rose with the family's consent, and she spent much of her life in a sanitarium. He never shed the guilt, and his will provided for her care.

Which star played the ruthless Mrs. Venable in the 1959 film of Suddenly, Last Summer?

Katharine Hepburn, angry at how the director treated the ailing Montgomery Clift, marked her last day on set by spitting: in his face in most tellings, on the floor in her own letter to Williams.

In Sweet Bird of Youth, the faded film star travelling with Chance Wayne uses what alias?

Princess Kosmonopolis is Alexandra del Lago, on the run from what she thinks was a disastrous comeback film. One phone call tells her it is a hit, and she has no more use for Chance.

The Night of the Iguana follows a disgraced clergyman working as a tour guide in which country?

Mexico: the 1964 film was shot around Puerto Vallarta, then a remote fishing village, and the press that followed Richard Burton's love affair to the set put the place on the tourist map.

Who directed the 1964 film of The Night of the Iguana starring Richard Burton and Ava Gardner?

John Huston was also the producer's pick to play Nonno, the aged poet, having lately taken up acting himself. He turned the part down to concentrate on directing and co-writing the script.

Williams's last Broadway play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, is a "ghost play" about which literary couple?

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald meet as ghosts at the asylum where Zelda was confined. The play opened on Williams's 69th birthday, closed after 14 performances and was the last he brought to Broadway.

Urged on by his brother Dakin, Williams converted in the 1960s to which faith?

Catholicism: his brother Dakin, a convert himself, steered him into the church when his health was poor. Dakin also had him committed to a clinic in 1969, which he believed was why the will left him almost nothing.

Which physician, nicknamed Dr. Feelgood, gave Tennessee Williams amphetamine injections?

Max Jacobson's shots were laced with amphetamine. Williams, who called him Dr. Feel Good in his Memoirs, claimed he wrote some of his best work under them; the doctor lost his licence in 1975.

Where was Williams found dead in February 1983?

A suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York: his secretary, who shared the two rooms, heard a noise at about 11 p.m. and did not investigate. He found Williams beside the bed the next morning.

Which poet, who leapt to his death from a ship, was Williams's idol and the source of Streetcar's epigraph?

Hart Crane jumped overboard from a steamer bound for New York in 1932, when Williams was 21. Williams took the epigraph of A Streetcar Named Desire from Crane's late poem The Broken Tower, and another for Sweet Bird of Youth.

Most of Williams's estate went to which university, held in trust while his sister Rose lived?

The University of the South, Sewanee was his grandfather's old college, not his own. Williams left the money in the grandfather's honour, to help writers whose work was progressive, original and preferably experimental.

Which director staged Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway and pressed Williams to rewrite Cat's third act?

Elia Kazan wanted a more sympathetic Maggie, a return for Big Daddy and a change of heart for Brick. Williams gave way, then printed both third acts and let readers choose.

Williams served as president of the jury of which film festival in 1976?

Cannes: the jury he chaired, with Charlotte Rampling, Costa-Gavras and Mario Vargas Llosa among its members, gave the Palme d'Or to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

What was Williams's last produced play, staged in 1982 the year before he died?

A House Not Meant to Stand never reached Broadway. Hurt by the failure of his previous play there, Williams gave it to the non-profit Goodman Theater, and it went on to an arts festival in Miami.

Which city has held an annual literary festival honouring Williams since 1986?

The US Postal Service put him on a stamp in 1995.

At the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche says she has always depended on the kindness of whom?

Strangers: she says it with perfect courtesy to the doctor who has come to take her to an asylum. The phrase later became the title of a major biography of Williams.

Williams's grandfather Walter Dakin, with whom he lived as a child, held what profession?

Episcopal priest: riding along on the Reverend Dakin's parish rounds gave the boy a store of Delta family stories. Decades later Williams left most of his estate to his grandfather's college, as a tribute to him.

Where did Williams first enroll in 1929, taking journalism classes?

University of Missouri: he came to study journalism and caught the playwriting bug instead. He left without a degree and needed nine years, and two more universities, to graduate.

In his opening speech, the narrator of The Glass Menagerie tells the audience it is what kind of play?

A memory play: because the narrator is remembering, he warns the audience that what they see may not be exactly what happened. Williams drew the family from his own mother and sister.

Who was Williams's long-time literary agent?

Audrey Wood sought him out after he won a Group Theatre prize, found him a Hollywood job and steered his career through its great years, until he turned on her in a fit of paranoia and drove her away.

Which prize named The Glass Menagerie the best American play of 1944–45?

The New York Drama Critics' Circle Award came on the first ballot, with nine of the fourteen votes. The Pulitzer that spring went to the comedy Harvey, which had taken only two of the critics' votes.

Where did Williams meet the young dancer Kip Kiernan in the summer of 1940?

Provincetown: they shared a shack on Captain Jack's Wharf until Kip left him for a woman. Williams called him his first great love and, forty years on, put that summer on stage in one of his last plays.

Of what did Frank Merlo, Williams's partner, die in 1963?

Lung cancer killed Merlo, the steadying presence in Williams's life. Williams fell apart, sinking into a depression that lasted most of a decade, years he later called his "stoned age".

What did the medical examiner find lodged in Williams's throat after his death in 1983?

A plastic bottle cap, of the kind fitted to nasal sprays and eye drops. Tests later found barbiturates in his body, and the examiner concluded he had apparently been using the cap to take them.