NEW YORK — Playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, who movingly portrayed the broken dreams of common people in “The Trip to Bountiful,” “Tender Mercies” and his Oscar-winning screen adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” died Wednesday in Connecticut, said Paul Marte, a spokesman for Hartford Stage. He was 92.
Foote died in his apartment in Hartford where he was preparing work on “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” a collection of nine plays, for next fall at the nonprofit theater, Marte said.
Foote left the cotton fields of his native Wharton, Texas, as a teenager, dreaming of becoming an actor. But realizing his gifts as a storyteller, he embarked on a writing career that spanned more than half a century and earned him two Academy Awards (“To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Tender Mercies”) and a 1995 Pulitzer Prize for “The Young Man From Atlanta.”
Foote was active in the theater until the end of his life. His play “Dividing the Estate,” the comic tale of a Texas family squabbling over an inheritance, was presented on Broadway this season by the Lincoln Center Theater.
The stories and lives of the people he loved in Texas became the bedrock for many of his plays, with the fictional Harrison, Texas, standing in for Wharton. Dividing his time between Texas and New York, he kept the Wharton home in which he had grown up and did much of his writing there.
“I picked a difficult subject, a little lost Texas town no one’s heard of or cares about,” Foote told The New York Times in 1995. “But I’m at the mercy of what I write. The subject matter has taken me over.”
Never one for urbane and trendy topics, Foote instead focused on ordinary people and how their nostalgic recollections would mislead them.
“My first memory was of stories about the past — a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived,” Foote wrote in 1988. “It didn’t take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone and nothing could be done about it.”
Foote married Lillian Vallish, who became his producer, in 1945. She died in 1992.
Three of their four children pursued careers in acting and writing.
Other Deaths
Molly Kool, 93, who in the 1930s and ’40s plied the lashing waters of the Bay of Fundy as the first woman in North America to be a licensed ship’s captain, died Wednesday at her home in Bangor, Maine.
A native of the Canadian province of New Brunswick, Kool was known familiarly throughout her life as Captain Molly. She qualified as a captain at age 23, and she spent the next five years in command of the Jean K, her father’s 70-foot engine- and sail-driven scow. In 2006, she was officially recognized by the Canadian government as the first woman to hold captain’s papers.
Hauling cargo up and down the Bay of Fundy and as far afield as Boston, Kool faced rain and fog, fire and ice, and the violent tides for which the bay is known. She also earned the disbelief, disdain and, eventually, respect of her rough-hewn male colleagues.
Sverre Fehn, 84, the Norwegian architect whose unique style of blending modern forms with Scandinavian traditions earned him the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, died in Oslo on Feb. 23, his grandson Jacob Fehn said.
Fehn graduated from the Architectural School of Oslo in 1949. He received international acclaim in 1958 with his Norwegian Pavilion at the Brussels World Exhibition and in 1962 with his Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Most of Fehn’s works are in Norway, including the white concrete Glacier Museum, which has been hailed as a landmark within contemporary architecture. Completed in 1991, it stands on a plain carved by Norway’s Jostedal Glacier at Fjaerland Fjord.
