[2] In high school she wrote and produced a children's radio show; then on full scholarship, she attended the private, all-female Elmira College where she divided her studies between writing and acting as well as editing the yearbook.

Fay's mother took her daughter to visit her grandmother in the Bronx, and it was there that she became devoted to the theater when she saw a matinée of Idiot's Delight starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

Michael was trained as an artist and had turned to commercial art and painting scenery for burlesque houses to help support his parents during the Great Depression.

Fay Kanin wrote the play, Goodbye, My Fancy, (originally titled Most Likely to Succeed) which was produced on Broadway by Michael.

The play was a Broadway smash and starred Madeleine Carroll, Conrad Nagel, and Shirley Booth,[3] and was eventually filmed by Vincent Sherman in 1951 with Joan Crawford and Robert Young.

[3] The Kanins wrote My Pal Gus (1952) in which Richard Widmark becomes a good father and falls in love with Joanne Dru, the Elizabeth Taylor film Rhapsody (1954) and The Opposite Sex (1956), a musical remake of The Women.

At first, Kanin was put off by the lack of an immediate reaction from an audience, but once she realized that more people had seen it in one night than would have seen it in theaters if it played for a year, she was hooked and wrote five more films for television.

For weeks, Kanin interviewed working girls at the Midtown North police station, and after the film aired, she received letters complimenting her on how fairly she had treated them.

Written and co-produced by Kanin, it starred Carol Burnett as a mother who challenges the military's "official story" of how her son died in Vietnam.

The non-fiction book by C. D. B. Bryan was about the Mullen family and their discovery that their son had been accidentally killed by American troops.

Kanin spent five months secluded with Bryan's research tapes adapting the book, and Friendly Fire won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama or Comedy Special that year.

[8] Their company produced Fun and Games for Valerie Harper, a tale of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace.

[9] For Norman Lear, Kanin wrote Heartsounds, which starred Mary Tyler Moore and James Garner as a couple coping with heart disease.

[11] Directed by Hal Prince with choreography by Lester Wilson, the cast included Ben Vereen as a song-and-dance man, Stubby Kaye as a slapstick comic, and Leilani Jones as a stripper named Satin.

The production was a disaster; the show lost its entire $4.75 million investment, and Prince and three other members of the creative team were suspended by the Dramatists Guild of America for signing a "substandard" contract.