Lillian Hellman & Nicole Kidman Were Born on June 20th

I predict that Nicole Kidman will play Lillian Hellman, wearing a prosthetic nose, in a bio-pic- LILLIAN!, for which she will win the Oscar.

I read & hear the most disparaging words about Nicole Kidman, but if you think she can’t act, just watch her turn in my good close personal friend- Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (she was robbed of an Oscar nom). If you don’t think she is a movie star, just consider her work in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. That performance was movie star tar & was Oscar nominated. If you think she is a delicate rose, watch her get dirty & tough in Australia (with a shirtless Hugh Jackman). She won the Best Actress Oscar for The Hours, for a supporting role, & when hers wasn't even the strongest performance in that beautiful film (that would be Julianne Moore).

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I am a fan of the writing of Lillian Hellman. I find her play- The Little Foxes to have a place in the cannon of the great American theatre works. But mostly, I was crazy about her 3 volumes of memoirs: An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (1969), Pentimento (1973), & Scoundrel Time (1976). The Oscar-winning film Julia was based on Pentimento, with Jane Fonda playing Hellman. She had a 30 year romance with writer Dashiell Hammett (played by Jason Robards in Julia, He won an Oscar) & it is said that she was the inspiration for his character Nora Charles in The Thin Man. Hellman was a life long friend & the literary executor of writer Dorothy Parker.

Hellman appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950. At the time, HUAC was well aware that Hellman's longtime lover Dashiell Hammett had been a Communist Party member. Asked to name names of acquaintances with communist affiliations, Hellman delivered a prepared statement, which read in part:


“ To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group. ”


As a result, Hellman was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios for many years.

She became a writer at a time when writers were celebrities and their recklessness was admirable. Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, & Hammett, Lillian Hellman was a smoker, a drinker, a lover, & a fighter. Hellman maintained a social & political life as large as her talent. While her plays were a constant challenge to injustice, her memoirs were personal accounts of the exciting & turbulent life behind the art.


I stood next to Hellman in line at Zabar’s on the Upper West Side on an autumn Sunday morning in 1976. She was in her 70s then. She smoked a cigarette & was wrapped in a large mink coat. I had just read & been absorbed by her terrific memoir- Pentimento. I excused myself for bothering her & explained how much I admired her work & how gobsmacked I was by the memoir. Stephen: “… so, Miss Hellman, you see how much your work & your life have impressed me” Lillian Hellman: “Of course they have. Now, be my dear & pay for the Danish. That’s being a sweetie.” Off she went. That scene could be perfectly reenacted by Nicole Kidman as Lillian Hellman & Bradley Cooper as young Stephen.