Tennessee Williams

Mississippi, St Louis, and a room full of glass

He was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, on 26 March 1911, the son of Edwina Dakin, the puritanical daughter of an Episcopal rector, and Cornelius Coffin Williams, a violent travelling salesman who moved the family to St Louis. There was an older sister, Rose, and a younger brother, Walter Dakin, born in 1919. Two things from the family's St Louis flat stayed with him and went into his plays: Rose's room, with its collection of little glass figures, which he later said held all the softest emotions that belong to memory; and the alley outside it, where at night he could hear dogs killing cats.

He entered the University of Missouri in 1929 to study journalism, was pulled out by his father and put to work as a clerk in a shoe company, which he called living death, wrote at night until he broke down, and finally graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938, nine years after starting college. In the same period his sister Rose lost her mind; the family consented to a prefrontal lobotomy — a brain operation then used on the mentally ill, which left her permanently altered — and she spent most of her life in institutions. At twenty-eight he left for New Orleans, began living openly as a gay man in a city that allowed it, and changed his name: Thomas Lanier Williams III started signing himself Tennessee, after the state his father's family came from.

Two plays that would not go away

A screenwriting contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the biggest of the Hollywood studios, which he despised, paid for the writing of a play first called The Gentleman Caller. As The Glass Menagerie it opened on Broadway on 31 March 1945, five days after his thirty-fourth birthday, with Laurette Taylor, a stage star making a comeback after years of drinking, as the mother. It is a memory play: the son narrates it from years later, so everything on stage is already lost. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — the prize voted each season by the New York reviewers — and, Williams said, frightened him far more than failure had.

A Streetcar Named Desire opened in December 1947, directed by Elia Kazan, with Jessica Tandy as Blanche and the twenty-three-year-old Marlon Brando as Stanley. Blanche DuBois arrives at her sister Stella's apartment in New Orleans with nothing left — the family estate gone, her teaching post gone, a marriage that ended in her young husband's suicide — and constructs a genteel version of herself that Stanley dismantles fact by fact until she is taken away to an asylum. It brought Williams a second Drama Critics' award and his first Pulitzer Prize, and gave the American stage a character actresses have chased ever since.

Paris, October 1949: Cocteau's adaptation and Arletty's Blanche

The play reached Paris on 15 October 1949, at the Théâtre Édouard VII just off the boulevard des Capucines. Two people turned it into French. Paule de Beaumont made the literal translation; Jean Cocteau then made the acting version — the adaptation, the text the actors would actually speak — and put his own theatrical instincts into it. Cocteau by then had written poems, novels and plays and directed the film La Belle et la Bête ('Beauty and the Beast'), and his name on a playbill was a guarantee of attention. Raymond Rouleau directed, and the Italian designer Lila de Nobili built the stage — the same pair who would give Paris Arthur Miller's The Crucible five years later, under the title Les Sorcières de Salem, 'The Witches of Salem'. The Bibliothèque nationale de France, the French national library, holds the record of the production, drawn up from its own copy of the programme.

Blanche was Arletty — born Léonie Bathiat, the star of the director Marcel Carné's films Hôtel du Nord and Les Enfants du paradis ('Children of Paradise'), and one of the two or three best-known faces in France. Yves Vincent played Stanley, Daniel Ivernel played Mitch, Héléna Bossis played Stella, and a young Louis de Funès — years before he became France's biggest comic star — had the small part of Pablo. A French-language Streetcar had already been staged in Belgium, in October 1948, by Le Rideau de Bruxelles, a repertory company based in the Brussels district of Ixelles; but the 1949 evening was the play's création in Paris — the French theatre word for a first production in a given city, the one that fixes how a play will be spoken from then on.

Williams spent much of 1948 and 1949 in Europe, mostly in Italy, and the surviving account of those months is in his own letters and his Memoirs rather than in any French archive. Whether he sat in the Édouard VII on the first night the Atlas has not established, and this page does not claim it. What is documented is the transaction itself: one of the most famous living French writers taking an American play apart and putting it back together for a Paris stage, two years after Broadway.

Brook's cat, Sagan's bird

Paris kept giving him to its stars. On 19 December 1956, La Chatte sur un toit brûlant — Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the Mississippi family play about a dying patriarch, a drinking son and the wife who will not let him go — opened at the Théâtre Antoine, a boulevard playhouse near the place de la République, in an adaptation by the dramatist André Obey, directed by the English director Peter Brook, with Jeanne Moreau as Margaret and Paul Guers as Brick. Moreau was twenty-eight, and within a few years would be one of the faces of the French New Wave — the nouvelle vague, the generation of young directors who from the late 1950s shot cheaply on real streets and remade French cinema.

On 28 September 1971, Le Doux Oiseau de la jeunesse — the French title of Sweet Bird of Youth, and a literal translation of it — opened at the Théâtre de l'Atelier, the small theatre on its own square in Montmartre. It was adapted by the novelist Françoise Sagan, famous in France since Bonjour tristesse ('Hello Sadness'), the bestseller she had published at eighteen, and directed by André Barsacq, the Atelier's long-serving head, with Edwige Feuillère — one of the most admired French stage actresses of the century — as the fading film star Alexandra Del Lago and Bernard Fresson as the young man who has attached himself to her. It ran 110 times and then toured to Lyon and Neuchâtel. By then Williams's American career had been in free fall for a decade; Paris was still casting him with its leading ladies.

The long decline, and the Hotel Elysée

Williams put the turning point at 1955. After Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — his third Drama Critics' award and second Pulitzer — the work got harder and the reviews got worse, and he kept himself going on strong coffee, cigarettes, pills and alcohol. He went into psychoanalysis in the late 1950s, hoping that if he stopped being disturbed he would stop writing disturbing plays; the first result, Period of Adjustment in 1960, is generally counted among his slightest. The Night of the Iguana won him a fourth Drama Critics' award in 1961 and was his last major success. He was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1968. Play after play failed through the 1970s. He went on writing anyway, more than two dozen full-length plays in all, and never stopped revising the finished ones.

He was found dead in his suite at the Hotel Elysée on East 54th Street in Manhattan at about 10.45 in the morning of 25 February 1983, aged seventy-one. The first report said natural causes; the autopsy found a plastic bottle cap of the kind used on eye drops or nasal spray lodged in his larynx, and the medical examiner classed such deaths as accidental. In August the chemical tests came back showing the barbiturate secobarbital in his body, and the examiner concluded that the cap had been in his mouth because he was using it to take the drug. The cause of death was asphyxia. He is claimed by three cities — Columbus, St Louis and New Orleans — and his papers by four archives, chief among them the Harry Ransom Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, and the Fred W. Todd collection at the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research library in the French Quarter.