Sonya Levien

Her life was a full American epic before she ever wrote a screenplay. Born Sara Opesken in a village in the Pale of Settlement, in what is now Lithuania, she came to New York's Lower East Side as a child after her exiled father escaped to America and remade the family under the name Levien. Growing up in the crowded immigrant quarter, she worked her way through school, enrolled in law, passed the bar in 1909, and briefly practiced as one of the very few female attorneys of her day.

Law gave way to letters. She became a magazine editor and short-story writer, and when her fiction began to be adapted for the screen she followed her work into the movie business. She survived the treacherous transition from silent film to sound that ended so many careers, and settled in for the long haul as a contract writer, eventually at MGM, where she became one of the studio's most dependable and versatile hands.

Over a career of roughly seventy produced films she wrote drama, romance, historical spectacle, and above all musicals. She had a knack for shaping sprawling material into warm, well-carpentered entertainment: the Americana of State Fair, the disaster epic In Old Chicago, the tenor showcase The Great Caruso, and lavish adaptations that carried the Hollywood musical into the widescreen era. In 1955 that long labor was crowned with an Academy Award for the screenplay of Interrupted Melody, the true story of the opera star Marjorie Lawrence, who fought back from polio to sing again.

Levien wrote in what was, by then, her fifth language, and she remained modest about a body of work most writers would envy. She died of cancer in 1960, her name largely absent from the histories, though her scripts entertained tens of millions and her journey from stateless refugee to Oscar winner is among the most remarkable in the industry's story.