The Philip Barry Story

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Philip Barry is best known today as the playwright who created two of the defining comic roles of Katharine Hepburn's career: Tracy Lord, the haughty rich girl who sails through "The Philadelphia Story" on a soft breeze of wealth, beauty and privilege, and Laura, the down-to-earth heiress ill at ease with her wealth who captures Cary Grant's heart in the 1938 George Cukor film, "Holiday."

Miss Hepburn's career in Hollywood was on the skids when Mr. Barry created Tracy Lord with the actress clearly in mind. After 14 starring film roles, Miss Hepburn was perceived as affected, remote and aristocratic. In an egalitarian culture, that spelled box-office poison. Tracy Lord, whom her own father says lacks "an understanding heart," is just such an inaccessible goddess. "Philadelphia" is the story of Tracy's -- and implicitly Miss Hepburn's -- comeuppance, humanization and redemption.

Both the play, which Miss Hepburn starred in at Broadway's Shubert Theatre in 1939, and the 1940 George Cukor movie (like "Holiday," adapted for the screen from Mr. Barry's play by Mr. Barry's good friend, the great Hollywood scenarist Donald Ogden Stewart) were smash hits. The twin successes revived Miss Hepburn's sputtering career and established a template, in the view of critic James Harvey and others, for her most successful future roles -- the superwoman humbled.

In his day, Philip Barry (1896-1949) was favorably compared to fellow playwright Noel Coward, but while modern audiences may remember the author of "Private Lives" and "Present Laughter," Mr. Barry has slipped into obscurity.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, Mr. Barry's finest plays were glittering champagne comedies about the rich and sophisticated that managed at the same time to probe such weightier themes as the relations between men and women, rich and poor. In addition to becoming one of the great screen comedies of all time (and Miss Hepburn's signature role), "The Philadelphia Story" was adapted a second time, by screenwriter Tom Patrick, as the smash 1956 movie musical "High Society," starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly and Louis Armstrong.

In 1928, Philip Barry established himself as the reigning American master of high comedy with "Holiday," the story of a wealthy young man who rejects the work ethic to live a life of hedonism while he is still young enough to enjoy it. It was an immediate success, but Philip Barry was no flash in the pan.

Throughout his career, "he constantly experimented with form and content," says Jack Marshall, artistic director of Arlington's American Century Theater, which revived Mr. Barry's play, "Hotel Universe," in 2001.

His plays were fodder for Tinseltown, but Mr. Barry never wrote the film adaptations, leaving them to Mr. Stewart and other screenwriters. As a stylist, Mr. Barry was summed up by New Yorker writer Brendan Gill in his book, "States of Grace," as someone who writes about "conditions in the life of the present time which shall be amusing, and at the same time amuse in such a way that one finds one is thinking about the play afterwards -- not exactly in amusement, but thoughtfully and pleasantly."

According to his papers at the Georgetown University collection, the upstate New York-born Mr. Barry began writing at age 9. After an education in Catholic and public schools, he entered Yale in 1913.