Anne Froelick

Anne Froelick, born Anne Froelick on December 8, 1913, in Hinsdale, Massachusetts, was an American stage performer, screenwriter, playwright, and novelist. She died on January 26, 2010, in a Los Angeles nursing home at the age of 96.

Froelick's early life was shaped by family transitions. When she was three years old, her mother remarried Louis D. Froelick, co-founder and editor of the magazine Asia, who subsequently adopted Anne and her sister Peggy. The family settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where Froelick attended Miss Fine's School under her stepfather's surname. Following her mother and stepfather's separation when she was fifteen, she relocated to Syracuse, New York, where her mother operated a dress shop catering to teenage girls. At sixteen, Froelick enrolled at Smith College, during which time she reestablished contact with her biological father, who provided her with monthly financial support. At nineteen, she moved to New York City to pursue acting, taking on minor roles in local stage productions and summer theater. To fund her acting career, she worked as a model at fashion shows for Lord & Taylor and other department stores, as well as for fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes.

Her Broadway career spanned 1935 to 1936, during which she appeared in productions of Saint Joan and Romeo and Juliet. While modeling for Hawes, Froelick's biological father encouraged her to study stenography. She accepted a secretarial position with John Houseman at the Mercury Theatre. Houseman and Orson Welles subsequently hired Howard Koch as a writer for The Mercury Theatre on the Air, and Froelick was reassigned as Koch's secretary. She assisted Koch on his radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, a broadcast that made broadcasting history upon its airing. In a 1997 reflection, Froelick noted that she selected a location near Princeton, New Jersey, as the landing site for the imaginary spaceship, and recalled that the production team was required to change the names of certain recognizable places.

In 1939, Warner Bros. hired Koch as a screenwriter, and he recommended Froelick for a writing position there as well. Her first assignment involved revising the script for The Letter, directed by William Wyler and released in 1940, including rewriting dialogue and romantic scenes. Despite her contributions, Koch received the sole screenwriting credit. The film received critical acclaim and earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture. After eighteen months, Warner Bros. offered Froelick her own writing contract. Her first official screen credit came with the 1941 drama Shining Victory, which she co-wrote with Koch.

Froelick's subsequent screenwriting work took her across several studios. She wrote the screenplay for Miss Susie Slagle's, released by Paramount Pictures in 1946, a project that had been delayed when director Sam Wood departed to film For Whom the Bell Tolls. She also moved to RKO Pictures to write The Master Race, released in 1944, performing on-set rewrites before returning to Paramount to complete the Miss Susie Slagle's script. Her later credits included Easy Come, Easy Go in 1947 and Harriet Craig in 1950 for Columbia Pictures, the latter a remake of the 1936 film Craig's Wife. Her screenwriting career spanned from 1941 to 1950.

During this period, Froelick became involved in political activism, opposing fascism and supporting unions and desegregation, which led her to join the Communist Party. In a 1997 interview, she described her participation as attending meetings and various events and activities. In 1951, her party membership resulted in her husband Philip Taylor losing his position as a manufacturing planner at Lockheed. At the final HUAC hearings in 1953, screenwriters Leopold Atlas and Sol Shor publicly named her as a communist, and she was subsequently blacklisted. She continued writing under her married name, Taylor, following the blacklisting.

After her screenwriting career ended, Froelick turned to other forms of writing. She wrote four plays that received local productions, among them Storm in the Sun, as well as one unpublished novel titled Fee Fi Fo Friend, which drew on her experiences with political activism and blacklisting. In 1956, Simon & Schuster published Press on Regardless, a comic novel about a female sports-car enthusiast that she co-wrote with Fern Mosk. Froelick also struggled with alcohol dependency during this period and later sought recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous.