Laurents also worked as a screenwriter on Hollywood films such as Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Rope (1948), Anastasia (1956), Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Sydney Pollack's romance The Way We Were (1973).

He received two Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for the Herbert Ross drama film The Turning Point (1977).

Born Arthur Levine, Laurents was the son of middle-class Jewish parents, his father a lawyer and his mother a schoolteacher, who gave up her career when she married.

His Bar Mitzvah marked the end of Laurents's religious education and the beginning of his rejection of all fundamentalist religions,[8] although he continued to identify himself as Jewish.

William N. Robson, his instructor, a CBS Radio director/producer, submitted his script Now Playing Tomorrow, a comedic fantasy about clairvoyance, to the network, and it was produced in the Columbia Workshop series on January 30, 1939, with Shirley Booth in the lead role.

(written for Lena Horne[14] but ultimately starring Leslie Uggams) and La Cage Aux Folles (1983), which he directed, however Nick & Nora was not successful.

"[15] Following the production's March 19 opening at the Palace Theatre, Ben Brantley of The New York Times called the translations "an only partly successful experiment" and added, "Mr. Laurents has exchanged insolence for innocence and, as with most such bargains, there are dividends and losses.

Director Anatole Litvak, unhappy with the script submitted by Frank Partos and Millen Brand for The Snake Pit (1948), hired Laurents to rewrite it.

Partos and Brand later insisted the bulk of the shooting script was theirs, and produced carbon copies of many of the pages Laurents actually had written to bolster their claim.

Having destroyed the original script and all his notes and rewritten pages after completing the project, Laurents had no way to prove most of the work was his, and the Writers Guild of America denied him screen credit.

[18] Upon hearing 20th Century Fox executives were pleased with Laurents' work on The Snake Pit, Alfred Hitchcock hired him for his next project, the film Rope starring James Stewart.

The Hays Office kept close tabs on his work, and the final script was so discreet that Laurents was unsure whether co-star James Stewart ever realized that his character was gay.

[19] In later years, Hitchcock asked him to script both Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969), However, Laurents, in both cases unenthused by the material, declined the offers.

The Way We Were (1973), in which he incorporated many of his own experiences, particularly those with the HUAC, reunited him with Barbra Streisand, and The Turning Point (1977), inspired in part by his love for Nora Kaye, was directed by her husband Herbert Ross.

[24][25] When Robbins approached Paramount Pictures about directing a screen version, the studio agreed as long as Laurents was not part of the package.

Laurents spent three months trying to clear his name, and after submitting a lengthy letter explaining his political beliefs in detail, it was determined they were so idiosyncratic he could not have been a member of any subversive groups.

In it, he discusses his lengthy career and his many gay affairs and long-term relationships, including those with Farley Granger and Tom Hatcher (August 24, 1929 - October 26, 2006).