William Hanley obit

William Hanley, Playwright and TV Writer, Dies at 80

 

He was not on the list.

William Hanley, who received critical acclaim as a Broadway and Off Broadway playwright in the 1960s and who later won Emmys for television scripts, died on May 25 at his home in Ridgefield, Conn. He was 80.

The cause was complications of a fall, his daughter Nell Hanley said.

“Remember the name William Hanley,” Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times in 1962, declaring Mr. Hanley “an uncommonly gifted writer.”

Mr. Taubman was reviewing two Off Broadway one-act plays by the playwright: “Whisper Into My Good Ear,” a portrait of two old men who share their loneliness living in a fleabag hotel and plan to commit suicide together; and “Mrs. Dally Has a Lover,” about a married woman and her romance with a teenager.

“His style is lean and laconic, shading almost shyly and unexpectedly into tenderness and poetry,” Mr. Taubman wrote. “His perception of character is fresh and individual.”

Those plays would earn a Drama Desk Award for Mr. Hanley in 1963. A year later his “Slow Dance on the Killing Ground” opened on Broadway. Set in a shabby luncheonette in a desolate factory district in Brooklyn, “Slow Dance” tells of three strangers who bare their wounds over several hours: the storekeeper, who is a non-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany; a schizophrenic black youth, who has an I.Q. of 187; and a teenage girl, who is searching for an abortionist.

“Slow Dance on the Killing Ground,” The New York Journal-American wrote in a profile of Mr. Hanley, “has been received by critics with the enthusiasm usually reserved for a Mary Martin musical.” But the accolades, and a Tony nomination, did not provide commercial success. “Slow Dance” ran for 88 performances; the Off Broadway plays had closed within a month.

Mr. Hanley turned to television — or, more precisely, it turned to him. He had written “Flesh and Blood,” about the travails of a disintegrating family, for the stage. In 1966, NBC paid him $112,500 for the play, at the time the most that television had paid an author for a single work.

Mixed reviews for “Flesh and Blood” notwithstanding, Mr. Hanley went on to write more than two dozen television scripts over the next 30 years, including one for “Something About Amelia,.” a 1984 ABC movie about incest, starring Ted Danson. It earned Mr. Hanley an Emmy. Nominated several times for Emmys, he received another in 1988 for the mini-series “The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank,” starring Paul Scofield, Mary Steenburgen and, as Anne, Lisa Jacobs.

Writing was in Mr. Hanley’s family: his uncles James and Gerald Hanley were novelists in Britain.

William Gerald Hanley was born on Oct. 22, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, one of three children of William and Annie Rodgers Hanley, who soon moved the family to Queens. Mr. Hanley attended Cornell for a year, then served in the Army before enrolling at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He worked in banks, in factories and as an encyclopedia salesman while writing his early scripts.

His sister Ellen Hanley, who died in 2007, was an actress best known for playing Fiorello H. La Guardia’s first wife in the 1959 Broadway musical “Fiorello!” Another actress in the production was Pat Stanley, whom he married in 1962; they later divorced.

Besides his daughter Nell, Mr. Hanley is survived by another daughter, Kate Hover; a sister, Patricia Hanley; and three grandchildren.

His writing was concerned less with social commentary than with social dynamics, Mr. Hanley told The Journal-American in 1964. He preferred, he said, to capture “what happens when you put such-and-such a person in a room with another sort of person? Then what happens when you put in a third person — how might they react to each other?”

Published plays (including anthologies)

Mrs Dally Has a Lover and Other Plays. New York: Dial Press, 1963. (Mrs Dally Has a Lover; Today is Independence Day; Whisper in My Good Ear).

Whisper in My Good Ear [and] Mrs. Dally Has a Lover; Two plays, Dramatists Play Service. 1963

Slow Dance on the Killing Ground. New York: Random House, 1964

No Answer. New York: Random House, 1968 (also in the anthology Collison Course—see below)

Flesh and Blood. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1968

The Best Plays of 1964–1965, edited by Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. Dodd, 1965

New Theater in America, Vol. 1. New York: Delta, 1965

Collision Course, edited by Edward Parone. New York: Random House, 1968

Best American Plays, Sixth Series, edited by John Gassner and Clive Barnes. New York: Crown Publishing, 1971

Screenplay

The Gypsy Moths (1969)

Plays for television

1968 Flesh and Blood (TV movie)

1973 Mrs. Dally Has a Lover (TV movie)

1975 Whisper into My Good Ear (TV movie)

1977 Testimony of Two Men (TV mini-series)

1978 Who'll Save Our Children? (TV movie)

1979 Too Far to Go (TV movie)

1980 Father Figure (TV movie)

1980 The Silent Lovers (TV movie) (teleplay)

1980 The Scarlett O'Hara War (TV movie) (teleplay)

1982 Little Gloria... Happy at Last

1984 Something About Amelia (Won Emmy).

1984 Celebrity

1987 When the Time Comes (TV movie)

1987 Nutcracker: Money, Madness & Murder (TV mini-series)

1988 Tales from the Hollywood Hills: Golden Land (TV movie) (teleplay)

1988 The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank (TV movie)

1990 The Kennedys of Massachusetts (TV mini-series)

1991 Our Sons (TV movie) (written by)

1991 In Broad Daylight (TV movie) (teleplay)

1991The Last to Go (TV movie) (teleplay)

1994 Scarlett (TV mini-series)

1997 Ellen Foster (TV movie) (teleplay)

1997 Passion's Way

1998 The Long Way Home (TV movie) (teleplay)

1999 The Reef (teleplay)

 

Radio play

A Country without Rain (1970)