Albert Hackett

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett were among the most durable and versatile writing partners the movies ever produced, and their partnership was also a marriage. Both began as stage actors, met in the theater, and married in 1931, and both soon discovered that their real talent lay in writing together rather than performing. For more than three decades they were inseparable, at the typewriter and at home.

At MGM they became masters of light, sparkling entertainment. They adapted Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man into the effervescent comedy-mystery that made stars of the martini-swilling detective couple Nick and Nora Charles, and they wrote several of its sequels. They supplied the book for lavish operettas like Naughty Marietta, the affectionate Americana of Ah, Wilderness, and, in the postwar years, a run of beloved comedies: Easter Parade, the wry Father of the Bride, and the exuberant frontier musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

They also had a hand in one of the most cherished of all American films. Working with Frank Capra, they helped write It's a Wonderful Life, the story of a small-town man shown what the world would be without him, a picture whose reputation only grew across the decades.

Their crowning achievement, though, came from tragedy. Asked to dramatize the diary of a Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis and died in the camps, the couple labored for two years to shape The Diary of Anne Frank for the Broadway stage. Their play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and did more than almost any other work to bring the reality of the Holocaust home to postwar American audiences, and they went on to write the screen version as well. Nominated repeatedly for Academy Awards over their long career, they retired in the 1960s. Goodrich died in 1984 and Hackett in 1995, leaving behind a body of work that ranged from the wittiest comedy to the most solemn testimony.