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He was a Texan, a chronicler of the South and author of more than 60 plays. He won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Young Man From Atlanta" and a pair of Oscars, one for his adaptation of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" and another for his original script, "Tender Mercies." At the time of his death, he was in Hartford, Conn., with his daughter, actress Hallie Foote, and putting the finishing touches on his nine-play magnum opus, "The Orphan's Home Cycle," about his family's history. Hallie shared these thoughts about her father with NEWSWEEK's Jesse Ellison:
He could write anywhere. I remember growing up, there'd be all this chaos because there were four kids—but my father could always just sit in his chair and write. He was a wonderful father, and in a way he had lots of children besides us: the theater was so important to him that it was also his family. It was his true home.
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The first play I worked on with him was called "Court-ship." I saw a side of him that I'd never seen because he was directing this particular play, and he was very exacting. He could be tough. If he didn't like something, he'd tell you. He was not sentimental. He could write about things that were sweet and simple, but there was also a kind of a fierceness, a complexity, a brutal quality underlying all of it, because that's part of life.
The thing I'll miss most is being able to ask him questions. He helped me solve the problems that come when you're working on a part and get stuck. He'd also been an actor, so he had the perspective of an actor. I think that's why actors liked to work on his plays. He understood the process and respected it.
The nine-play cycle was his life's work. It's his legacy. He finished it, and then he passed away, which is kind of a great thing. His timing was great. He started it right after his parents passed away—it just came out of him. I always said to him, "You didn't go into psychoanalysis, you just wrote these plays." The title is from a line in a Marianne Moore poem: "The world's an orphan's home." And it's true. We're all going to end up that way. It's how I feel right now; it's that line.
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