Jean Rouverol was an American author, actress and screenwriter who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s.
Life and career
Rouverol was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of playwright Aurania Rouverol, who created Andy Hardy and wrote many of the films in the MGM series. After being spotted in a high school production, Rouverol first acted in a Hollywood motion picture at the age of seventeen, appearing as W. C. Fields' daughter in the comedy It's a Gift. She continued to perform mainly in supporting roles, making another eleven films until 1940 when she married screenwriter Hugo Butler. With four children coming in quick order, Rouverol did not return to film acting but throughout the 1940s performed on radio, including playing Betty Carter on One Man's Family. While her husband was away serving in the U.S. military during World War II, she wrote her first novella, which she sold to McCall's magazine in 1945. By 1950, she had her first screenplay made into a film, but her career was interrupted as a result of the investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities into Communist influence in Hollywood.
American Communist Party/HUAC
In 1943, Rouverol and her husband had joined the American Communist Party. In 1951, when agents for HUAC attempted to subpoena them, Rouverol and her husband chose self-exile to Mexico with their four small children rather than face a possible prison sentence, as endured by some of their friends who were dubbed the Hollywood Ten. Labeled as subversives and dangerous revolutionaries by the government, they did not return to the United States on a permanent basis for thirteen years, during which time they had two more children. In Mexico, she continued to write screenplays, short stories and articles for various American magazines to earn money. Three screenplays she co-wrote with her husband were accepted for filming by the Hollywood studios because agent Ingo Preminger arranged for friends from the Writers Guild of America to put their names on the scripts. In 1960 the family moved to Italy, so Rouverol and her husband could work on a film script. In 1961 the family, with the exception of son Michael and daughter Susan, moved to Rome for two years. After a few years, in 1964 they briefly lived in Mexico again, and then returned to the United States for good. Living in California again, she and her husband continued their screenplay collaboration. She wrote a book on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her husband died in 1968. In the 1970s, Rouverol returned to writing. She scripted an episode of Little House on the Prairie, and after publishing three books in three years, she was hired as co-head writer for the CBSsoap operaGuiding Light. For this show she received a Daytime Emmy nomination and a Writers Guild of America Award. Rouverol, by then sixty years old, left the show in 1976. Her book "Writing for the Soaps" was published in 1984. She taught writing at the University of Southern California and at UCLA Extension. Rouverol wrote scripts for Search for Tomorrow and As the World Turns. She served four terms on the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America, and in 1987 she received the Guild's Morgan Cox Award as a member "whose vital ideas, continuing efforts and personal sacrifice" best exemplified the ideal of service to the Guild. In 2000, Rouverol published Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years, which told the story of her family's life in exile.
Death
For many years Rouverol lived with actor Cliff Carpenter, who was another former blacklisted performer. Carpenter died on January 9, 2014 at the age of 98. Rouverol died on March 24, 2017 at the age of 100.
