Katherine Albert


Katherine Albert was an American screenwriter, playwright, and TV writer.

Biography

Katherine was born in Kentucky, the only child of George Albert and Logie Bell Evans. As a young girl, she dreamed of becoming an actress, and she persuaded a family friend who was related to D. W. Griffith to get her an introduction when she moved to California at age 16. Griffith brought her onto his stock company, and she appeared in a few small roles on the stage and in silent films before deciding that acting wasn't for her. The family moved away from Los Angeles for a time.
When she moved back to Hollywood in her early 20s, she began writing for publications like The Los Angeles Daily News and Photoplay before getting a job in MGM's publicity department. Early on in that assignment, she was charged with working with Greta Garbo, who she apparently didn't get along well with.
At MGM, she met Dale Eunson, who later become editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. The pair married in 1931, and together, they collaborated on a number of short stories, stage plays, and screenplays. Loco was later used, together with Zoe Akins' The Greeks Had a Word for It, as a source for the 1953 film How to Marry a Millionaire starring Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, and Lauren Bacall.
They had a daughter, Joan Eunson, named after Joan Crawford, who became an actress and entertainment journalist. Albert was encouraging of Joan's career, but preferred not to meddle: "I've had to work with a lot of movie mamas. Believe me, I want no part of that".
She and Euson wrote most of their films and TV episodes after Albert suffered a major heart attack around 1950. During the 1950s and 1960s, they wrote half a dozen films and over a dozen TV episodes. They worked almost all the way up through Albert's death in 1970.

Selected works

Film