Born in Missouri in 1911 Thomas Laine Williams adopted the pseudonym Tennessee Williams and in the 1940s and 1950s wrote some of the finest plays to emerge from post-war America. They were successfully produced on Broadway and turned into powerful movies made by acclaimed directors and featuring stellar casts. But all of them are shot through with William’s unique writing style and ear for dialogue.

Williams adopted the style of Southern Gothic, a form of writing which examined the troubles of the post-bellum American South through characters who were flawed and disturbed, often living in decaying locations. Williams translated these themes into the inner turmoil of characters obsessed with sexual desires, class consciousness, persistent racial tensions, and moral decay, as a metaphor for the decline of the Southern states. They used a unique style of poetic realism which exposed the flawed characters through physical actions on stage and burst of emotional tension.

Depot is proud to present five of his most famous adaptations. Often considered his masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) is a tour-de-force of acting by Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh around the sexual and psychological tensions of a household in the New Orleans French Quarter. In 1958, Richard Brooks directed a film version of Williams’ other famous play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, and Newman went on to play Chance Wayne in one of his greatest roles in Brooks’ Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) as a failed actor with broken dreams.

In between, one of Williams’ most disturbing plays, Suddenly Last Summer (1959) was filmed by Joseph Mankiewicz in 1959 with Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn, dealing with powerful themes of trauma and insanity. It fell to John Huston to direct perhaps Williams’ final great play Night of the Iguana (1964) with Richard Burton in incendiary form as a defrocked priest. A strong trio of performances by Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon elevate the movie to the stuff of Greek tragedy.