Playwright, screenwriter, and stage director who wrote the libretto for the classic musicals Gypsy and West Side Story, directed the long-running Broadway adaptation of La Cage aux Folles, and penned the screenplays for several Hollywood hits including Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, the romantic classic The Way We Were, and the backstage ballet drama The Turning Point. With his lover of five decades, Tom Hatcher, he established the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award, a cash stipend presented annually to fund production of an original play of social relevance, written by an emerging American playwright.
[1] Arthur Laurents, Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood (2000). A review of this work in Publishers Weekly notes that Laurents "is brutally honest about his personal life -- his difficulty coming to terms with his gayness, his anger at colleagues like Elia Kazan who named names to HUAC and his even greater anger at himself for working with them." Also see Gerard Raymond, "His Brilliant Career: Writer/Director Arthur Laurents", The Advocate, 9 May 2000.
Father: Irving Laurents
Mother: Ada Robbins
Boyfriend: Farley Granger (actor, dated late 1940's to early 1950s)
Boyfriend: Tom Hatcher (real estate developer, together 1955-2007, d. 2006)
High School: Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn, NY (1933)
University: AB English, Cornell University (1937)
Tony Best Musical, for Hallelujah, Baby! (1968)
Drama Desk Award Best Director, for Gypsy (1975)
Tony Best Director, for La Cage aux Folles (1984)
Dean for America
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
MoveOn.org
FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Broadway: The Golden Age (Apr-2003) · Himself
The Celluloid Closet (13-Sep-1995) · Himself
Author of books:
Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood (2000, memoir)
Born: 