HAPPY BIRTHDAY IRENE MAYER SELZNICK
(April 2, 1907 - Oct. 10, 1990)

The daughter of Louis B. and Margaret (Shenberg) Mayer, her career as a producer in the New York theater began in 1947.  She wrote in her memoir, A Private View (1983) that the first part of her life was spent in the shadow of her father who built MGM into the most respected studio in Hollywood.
Her marriage to David O. Selznick united two of Hollywood's dynasties. "Movies were like a great cause to us. We had one romance with each other and another with the movies." (A Private View).

Visits to New York in the 1930s forged the beginning of her connections in the theater and laid the groundwork for her career as a producer. She is perhaps best known as producer of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). She also produced John Van Druten's Bell, Book and Candle (1950, Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden (1955) and Graham Greene's The Complaisant Lover which was a smash hit in London, but ran for only three months in New York (1961).

Perhaps her most significant accomplishment as a producer was to insist always on the priority of the show. To ensure the success of her productions, she was willing to endure the difficult temperaments of performers such as the unpredicatable, moody Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire and the icy imperious Gladys Cooper in The Chalk Garden. When noted Irish star Siobhan McKenna accepted a major role in The Chalk Garden and then vanished to a remote island off the Irish coast, Selznick sent a man in a rowboat to contact her instead of firing her.

Mel Gussow, New York Times drama critic, in writing about Selznick's Broadway career, said, "When she produced Streetcar and other plays, she worked hand in glove with the playwright in insuring that the work was seen absolutely to its best advantage."

From 1985 to her death in New York on October 10, 1990, she was president of the Louis B. Mayer Foundation. Breaking the foundation's tradition of gifts to film schools and institutes, she gifted five million dollars to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute of Boston. In her will, she left a hundred thousand dollars to the Young Playwrights Foundation to provide income for travel and housing for talented new writers, ensuring her continued involvement in the new young voices of theatre and screen.

Resources: Irene Mayer Selznick by Angela Wigan Marvin. Jewish Women's Archive
Notable Women in the American Theatre (1989)