She said her career in New York City lasted "for about 25 minutes" when she realized that she only liked rehearsals and the first week of performance, and would rather be "out there" where the decisions were being made.

[5] In the early 1940s, she married "the first grown man who asked me," Robert M. Davis, a promising young singer, and they lived in Claremont, California, during World War II.

Allen waited for a couple of months and sent it back, rightly figuring that some reader had rejected it instead of Whitehead himself.

When Allen read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark, she instantly saw play potential where no one else did.

After undergoing hypnotherapy to alleviate a yearlong bout of writer's block, Allen produced a draft of the play in three days.

Hitchcock brought Allen to California to work on the film at Universal Studios in the San Fernando Valley.

In Allen's opinion, she could not learn fast enough to make a first-rate movie, although she thought Marnie did have some good scenes in it.

"[5] The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, about an iconoclast Scottish girls' school teacher, did not premiere on the London stage until after Marnie's completion.

Produced by Donald Albery, it premiered at the Wyndham's Theatre in May 1966 with Vanessa Redgrave and ran hundreds of performances.

Her adaptation of the French boulevard comedy by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy premiered in December 1968 with Julie Harris as the 42-year-old who has an affair with a 22-year-old man.

But Hepburn had just starred in the disastrous adaptation of Madwoman of Chaillot and did not want, in Allen's words, "to play another crazy old lady."

Hepburn was reluctant to let Cukor down and would not admit her reservations and began to find fault with the script, even rewriting many sections herself.

Eventually, Hepburn provoked the studio into making her quit the project, leaving Fryer free to bring Jean Brodie's Maggie Smith onto the picture.

[citation needed] The producers had not wanted to film the stage script by Joe Masteroff and John Van Druten, and felt that not portraying the male lead as a homosexual was dishonest to the story.

"[10] In Allen's opinion most of the humor from the original was lost; she believed Fosse did not really like the lead character of Sally Bowles at all.

[9] She worked on the screenplay for ten months, but in the end Fosse and the producers were still unhappy with the final form, and having commitments elsewhere, Allen handed the script over to her friend Hugh Wheeler.

It was not until two years later that ABC entered a production deal with Mike Nichols, who turned down all their ideas in favor of the script for Family that his Connecticut neighbor Jay Allen had shown him.

It was Nichols who brought in Mark Rydell for the pilot, which premiered at 10:00 pm on March 9, 1976; the series went on to run for four years and 86 episodes.

[4] When Allen read Robert Daley's book, Prince of the City (1978), she was convinced it was a Sidney Lumet project, but the film rights had already been sold to Orion Pictures for Brian De Palma and David Rabe.

She was put off by the book's non-linear story structure, but Lumet would not make the picture without her and agreed to write the outline for her.

[4] It was her first project with living subjects, and Allen interviewed nearly everyone in the book and had endless hours of Bob Leuci's tapes for back-up.

"[9] Allen adapted Ira Levin's play Deathtrap (1982) for Lumet, exchanging a weak, confusing ending for a more directly resolved one.

[9] Allen returned to the stage with an adaptation for Angela Lansbury of A Little Family Business, a French boulevard comedy by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy.

[6] She was also hired by Broadway producer Allan Carr to adapt Jean Poiret's non-musical 1973 play La Cage Aux Folles as a musical reset in New Orleans.

The never-to-be-produced production was called The Queen of Basin Street, and was to be directed by Mike Nichols with Tommy Tune choreographing and Maury Yeston writing the songs.

[12] When Carr finally produced a musical version, Allen was forced to file suit for payment from her work on the adaptation.

[9] Twentieth-Century Fox brought Allen in for a rewrite when they were unhappy with the script that David Mamet had produced from Barry Reed's novel The Verdict, thinking he had deviated too much from the original material.

[9] Allen tried to recapture the success of Family with Hothouse for ABC in 1988; the drama about the lives and work experiences of the staff of a mental hospital lasted eight episodes.

[6] She would spend her later years as a script doctor and observing particularly salacious crime trials from the benches in Manhattan Criminal Court.

"[9]In 1986, she had signed an agreement with Lorimar-Telepictures in order to help develop, write and produce projects, in collaboration with ABC Entertainment.