Fay Kanin

This screenwriter and playwright began working in Hollywood in the early 1940s, usually in collaboration with her husband, Michael Kanin, and blossomed after his retirement as a writer and producer of some of the small screen's most distinguished TV-movies. Statuesque, articulate, with the air of a socialite, Fay Kanin became an industry leader through her presidency of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences, 1979-1983. Born Fay Mitchell in New York City, she married Michael Kanin in 1940, a few years after he had abandoned a career as a commercial artist and had begun writing. They moved to Hollywood, where, in 1942, he won an Academy Award for co-writing Woman of the Year (1942), the film that launched the Tracy-Hepburn screen collaboration. Kanin's career was slower to start. In 1942, she contributed the story to Blondie for Victory (1942), one of the low-budget second feature series based on the popular comic strip by Chic Young, and, with her husband and Allen Rivkin, co-wrote S