Rose Caylor (born Rose Libman, 15 March 1898 – March 1979) was a Russian-American screenwriter, playwright, actress, and journalist known for her work in the U.S. in the 1920s through the 1940s. She was married to filmmaker and journalist
Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht (; February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. A successful journalist in his youth, he went on to write 35 books and some of the most enjoyed screenplay ...
.
Biography
Rose was born into a Jewish family in Vilna, in what was then the Russian Empire. Her father, Morris Libman, emigrated to the U.S. in 1907, and Rose and her mother and sister followed the next year, settling in Chicago, Illinois.
Rose attended the
University of Chicago and afterward began working at ''
The Chicago Daily News
The ''Chicago Daily News'' was an afternoon daily newspaper in the midwestern United States, published between 1875 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.
History
The ''Daily News'' was founded by Melville E. Stone, Percy Meggy, and William Dougherty ...
'', where she met her future husband, writer Ben Hecht. The pair moved to New York together in 1924, and married in 1926 after his divorce from his first wife was finalized. They'd have one daughter, actress Jenny Hecht.
Over the course of her career as a writer, she wrote a number of original stage plays and novels; she also authored the 1942 film noir ''
Fingers at the Window''. She appears to have worked on several films with her husband that she didn't receive credits on. She also translated plays from Russian into English for Broadway productions. During World War II, she went to work on the assembly line at an aviation plant.
Ben Hecht died in 1964, and Jenny Hecht died of an accidental drug overdose in 1971. Rose was living in
Nyack, New York, where she died in March 1979.
Selected works
Screenplays:
* ''
Fingers at the Window'' (1942)
* ''
Once in a Blue Moon'' (1936) (uncredited)
* ''
Spring Tonic
''Spring Tonic'' is a 1935 American comedy film adapted from the play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. It was directed by Clyde Bruckman and stars Lew Ayres, Claire Trevor, Walter Woolf King, Jack Haley, ZaSu Pitts and Tala Birell. It was rel ...
'' (1935) (uncredited)
Stage plays:
* ''Man-Eating Tiger''
* ''All He Ever Loved''
* ''Lentil''
Novels:
* ''The Journey''
* ''The Balcony''
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Caylor, Rose
1898 births
1979 deaths
20th-century American women writers
American women screenwriters
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
University of Chicago alumni
20th-century American screenwriters
Emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States