Jean Rouverol

Jean Rouverol (July 8, 1916 – March 24, 2017) was an American actress, screenwriter, and author born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother, playwright Aurania Rouverol, created the Andy Hardy fictional character and contributed to many of the MGM Andy Hardy film screenplays. Rouverol's Broadway appearances spanned 1933 to 1936 and included the productions So Proudly We Hail and Growing Pains.

Her performing career began on stage before extending to film and radio. While on a break from Stanford University, she appeared in Max Reinhardt's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Hollywood Bowl, sharing the stage with Mickey Rooney, who played Puck. She was drawn away from that production to play W. C. Fields' daughter in the 1934 comedy It's a Gift, her screen debut. Over the following years she took on supporting roles in eleven additional films before retiring from film acting in 1940, the year she married screenwriter Hugo Butler. During the 1940s she remained active in radio, including a recurring role as Betty Carter on One Man's Family. While Butler served in the U.S. military during World War II, Rouverol completed a novella that she sold to McCall's magazine in 1945.

Her first screenplay credit, So Young So Bad, was produced in 1950, but her career was soon disrupted by the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigations into Communist influence in Hollywood. Rouverol and Butler had joined the Communist Party USA in 1943, and when HUAC attempted to subpoena them in 1951, the couple chose to leave the United States rather than risk imprisonment, as colleagues in the Hollywood Ten had faced. They relocated to Mexico with their four children and did not return permanently for thirteen years, during which time they had two more children.

During the years in exile, Rouverol wrote short stories and articles for American magazines and contributed scripts to the television soap opera Search for Tomorrow. She and Butler co-wrote three screenplays that their agent, Ingo Preminger, sold to Hollywood studios by arranging for Writers Guild of America members to serve as fronts, placing their names on the scripts in place of the blacklisted couple. In 1960 the family moved to Rome so Butler could write the script for director Robert Aldrich's 1962 film Sodom and Gomorrah. The family settled permanently in the United States in 1964. Butler had by then developed arteriosclerotic brain disease, and he died in January 1968, the same year their co-written screenplay The Legend of Lylah Clare was produced.

Following Butler's death, Rouverol concentrated on writing. Her first book, Harriet Beecher Stowe: Woman Crusader, appeared in 1968. In the early 1970s she published three additional books within three years, among them biographies of Pancho Villa and Benito Juárez. She then shifted her focus to television writing, contributing to the daytime drama Bright Promise and writing a 1974 episode of Little House on the Prairie. As co-head writer of the CBS soap opera Guiding Light, she received both a Daytime Emmy nomination and a Writers Guild of America Award. She also contributed scripts to As the World Turns. Her instructional book Writing for the Soaps was published in 1984, and she taught writing at the University of Southern California and UCLA Extension.

Rouverol served four terms on the Writers Guild of America board of directors. In 1987 the Guild presented her with its Morgan Cox Award, given to a member whose ideas, efforts, and personal sacrifice best represented the ideal of service to the organization. In January 2001, at the age of 84, she published the memoir Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years, documenting her family's years in exile. In her later years she lived with actor Cliff Carpenter, a fellow former blacklistee, who died on January 9, 2014, at the age of 98. Rouverol died on March 24, 2017, at the age of 100.