Sarah Marshall Kernochan is an American documentarian, film director, screenwriter and producer. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including two Academy Awards
After Sarah Lawrence, she worked as a ghostwriter for The Village Voice for about a year. After quitting that job, she became interested in documentary film-making and soon gained national prominence in the United States as co-director and co-producer with Howard Smith of the 1972 filmMarjoe, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Kernochan's first screen credit as a screenwriter came with the 1986 film 9½ Weeks. She followed that film with the script for Dancers, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and directed by Herbert Ross, which chronicled the backstage drama of a ballet company and their director during the staging of the ballet Giselle. By the time she was brought in to work on the 1993 film Sommersby, she had become known for a particular style of writing in Hollywood. She commented in an interview with Salon.com: Since then, she has been primarily a screenwriter for such films as Dancers ; Impromptu, the debut film directed by her husband James Lapine with a script she characterized as "maybe the best thing that I will ever do"; Sommersby ; wrote and directed The Hairy Bird ; co-wrote the story for What Lies Beneath ; and directed Thoth and wrote Learning to Drive. Her second documentary, Thoth, also won an Academy Award in 2002, this time for Best Documentary Short Subject. She has taught screenwriting at Emerson College. In August 2014, her feature script Learning to Drive, based on a New Yorker story by Katha Pollitt, went before cameras. The film, starring Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson, was released in the US on August 21, 2015.
Novels
In 1977, Kernochan's novel Dry Hustle was published. It was reprinted as an ebook in 2011. In June 2011, Kernochan released her first novel in over 35 years entitled Jane Was Here. A mysterious young woman, calling herself Jane, arrives in the small rundown community of Graynier, Massachusetts. She can point out the house where she grew up, though she has never been to Graynier in her life. Jane carries with her the fragmentary memory of her former life, and refuses to adjust to her new identity. Thus begins Jane's mission, to retrieve the puzzle pieces of a former life, groping her way through the past and the present simultaneously.
Music career
Sarah is also a singer, lyricist, and composer. During the next two years after the release of Marjoe, she released two albums on RCA Records as a singer-songwriter, House of Pain and Beat Around the Bush. Kernochan released her third album as a singer-songwriter, "Decades of Demos," in 2013. She also wrote and directed the musical Sleeparound Town, which was a show about puberty and featured five adolescents.
Personal life
Kernochan is married to American stage director James Lapine, a Pulitzer Prize and three-time Tony Award winner. The couple's daughter is food writer, Phoebe Lapine. She owns a house in Edgartown, Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard which is next door to the Vineyard house built by her grandfather in 1934.
