A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Alias:
Stephen Avery
Birthplace:
Webster Groves, Missouri, USA
Born:
December 20, 1893
Died:
February 10, 1948
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Stephen Morehouse Avery (December 20, 1893 – February 10, 1948) was an American author of Hollywood screenplays. His daughter is the actress Phyllis Avery. Avery was born to Charles M. and Jesse Avery in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. The senior Avery was a cashier at an insurance company. Stephen Avery attended the University of Missouri at Columbia and was employed in Detroit, Michigan, before he began professional writing. Avery wrote for national publications until 1933, when he began to specialize in screenplays. His work included Wharf Angel (1934), Our Little Girl (1935), One Rainy Afternoon (1936) with Ida Lupino and Francis Lederer, The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) with Joan Crawford, I'll Take Romance (1937), Four Mothers (1941), The Male Animal (1942), starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland and based on a James Thurber play and Deep Valley (1947), with Ida Lupino and Dane Clark, the story of a lonely woman living on a farm who is smitten by an escaped convict. Shortly before his death of a heart attack at his Los Angeles, California, apartment at the age of fifty-four, Avery penned the scripts for The Woman in White (1948) and Every Girl Should Be Married (1948), a romantic comedy starring Cary Grant and Betsy Drake. In 1935, he was nominated with Don Hartman for an Academy Award for Best Story for The Gay Deception, a film unrelated to homosexuality and not to be confused with two other comedy films with similar titles, The Gay Deceiver (1926) and The Gay Deceivers (1969). In the story, Mirabel, portrayed by Frances Dee, wins a $5,000 lottery, a near fortune in 1935, and moves to New York City, where she meets Sandro, played by Francis Lederer, a bellboy who is really a prince. The film was directed by William Wyler. Avery was survived by his wife, the former Marian Baldwin, and his only child, Phyllis Avery (born 1924), who launched her acting career in 1951. Among other stars, Phyllis Avery was cast opposite Charlton Heston, George Gobel, Richard Egan, Chuck Connors, Lew Ayres, and Ray Milland.
Adaptation:
1934 The Pursuit of Happiness
1935 Our Little Girl
Screenplay:
1934 The Pursuit of Happiness
1934 Wharf Angel
1935 Our Little Girl
1935 The Gay Deception
1936 One Rainy Afternoon
1936 The Gorgeous Hussy
1939 Rio
1941 Four Mothers
1942 The Male Animal
1947 Deep Valley
Story:
1934 The Pursuit of Happiness
1934 Wharf Angel
1935 Our Little Girl
1935 The Gay Deception
1936 One Rainy Afternoon
1936 The Gorgeous Hussy
1937 I'll Take Romance
1938 Hard to Get
1939 Rio
1941 Four Mothers
1942 The Male Animal
1947 Deep Valley
Writer:
1934 The Pursuit of Happiness
1934 Wharf Angel
1935 Our Little Girl
1935 The Gay Deception
1936 One Rainy Afternoon
1936 The Gorgeous Hussy
1937 I'll Take Romance
1938 Hard to Get
1939 Rio
1941 Four Mothers
1942 The Male Animal
1947 Deep Valley
1948 Every Girl Should Be Married
1948 The Woman in White
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.