Mary Orr

Mary Orr (December 21, 1910 – September 22, 2006) was an American actress, playwright, and author born in Brooklyn, New York. After her family relocated to Canton, Ohio during her childhood, she was raised there and in Cleveland. She later graduated from Ward-Belmont College and pursued further study at Syracuse University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan. In private life she was known as Mary Orr Denham, having married director and playwright Reginald Denham.

Orr's Broadway acting career spanned from 1931 to 1955, beginning with Berlin in 1931 and continuing through Child of Manhattan and Chrysalis, both in 1932. She subsequently appeared in Jupiter Laughs in 1940, Wallflower in 1944, and Dark Hammock that same year. Her later stage appearances included Sherlock Holmes in 1953 and The Desperate Hours in 1955. Among those productions, she performed in two plays she had co-written herself: Wallflower and Dark Hammock.

Alongside her acting work, Orr collaborated with her husband on four Broadway productions. Their first, the comedy Wallflower, opened in 1944 and ran for 192 performances. Round Trip followed in 1945, and Dark Hammock, a melodrama, began its run in 1946. The comedy Be Your Age reached Broadway in 1953. A film adaptation of Wallflower was released in 1948.

Orr's most enduring contribution to American culture came through her short story "The Wisdom of Eve," published in the May 1946 issue of Cosmopolitan. According to her New York Times obituary, the story was loosely based on an unnamed woman who had served as secretary to Viennese actress Elisabeth Bergner. Orr subsequently wrote a radio adaptation that aired on NBC in 1949, which led directly to Twentieth Century Fox acquiring the property. Although she sold the story to the studio for $5,000 and received no screen credit, the resulting film, All About Eve, won the Academy Award in 1950, and Orr received a Screen Writers Guild award for her original story. She published a sequel, "More About Eve," in the July 1951 issue of Cosmopolitan. In 1964, Orr and Reginald Denham adapted the original short story into a stage play of the same name, which was produced off-Broadway in 1979. The 1970 Broadway musical Applause, a hit production also derived from All About Eve, credited Orr for the original story.

Beyond her stage and story work, Orr wrote five books and forty television scripts, either alone or in collaboration with her husband. Her first novel, Diamond in the Sky, published in 1956, centered on the New York theater world. Reginald Denham predeceased her in 1983. Orr died of pneumonia in Manhattan on September 22, 2006, at the age of 95.