Brief Biography

Born:  March 14, 1916

“Horton Foote Interview.”  Interview by Mike Wood.  Camera by Rick Pepin.  Edit by Steve Worley.  March 4, 1989.  Wharton, Texas.  Site hosted by The William Inge Center for the Arts.  Video hosted by Wichita State University.  

Born in Wharton, Texas in 1916, Foote decided in his youth to become an actor and his father financed his early training in Dallas and Pasadena. His ambition lead him to New York where he eventually discovered that he was better suited to the writing of plays. His early career of writing for the stage led him into writing television drama. He wrote plays for Playhouse 90, Philco Playhouse and U.S. Steel Hour. The next step in his career lead to Hollywood where he wrote an adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill A Mockingbird. This screen play won for him his first Academy Award and provided an acting opportunity for Robert Duvall. Twenty years later, Mr. Foote wrote the screenplay Tender Mercies especially for Duvall. This film brought Academy Awards to both Duvall and Foote. In 1985, Mr. Foote's play A Trip to Bountiful, (which in years past had been produced on the stage and television) won an Academy Award for Geraldine Page. Mr. Foote, with his wife Lillian and three of his four children, formed an independent motion picture company in order to produce screen versions of some of his nine plays in "The Orphans' Home," a cycle based on the lives of his mother and father in Wharton, Texas. Two of his children, Hallie Foote and Horton Foote, Jr., act in these films as well as in stage and television dramas he has written. In 1987, Foote's The Story of a Marriage appeared on PBS as a five and one-half hour mini-series in which Hallie Foote, Amanda Plummer and Matthew Broderick starred. Grove press published Courtship, Valentine's Day, and 1918 in 1987, a second volume was published in 1988 containing Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, and The Widow Claire. In 1989 he published Cousins and Death of Papa, thus completing the The Orphans' Home cycle. Other publications include Selected One-Acts and Screenplays, Tender Mercies, The Trip to Bountiful, and To Kill a Mockingbird.