Jay Presson Allen obituary

American screenwriter and playwright Jay Presson Allen has died at the age of 84. She was best known for adapting work for the screen, including Marnie, The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie and Cabaret. There is an obituary by Ronald Bergan in The Guardian.

Based on a pulp novel by Winston Graham, Marnie, one of Hitchcock's most bizarre psychological/sexual thrillers, was Allen's first screenplay. "Hitch taught me more about screenwriting than I learned in all the rest of my career, and I think of his flair for visual shorthand whenever I get verbose," she recalled. "I think one of the reasons that Hitch was fond of me, and filmed a lot of the stuff I wrote, was that I am frequently almost crippled by making everything rational. There always has to be a reason for everything. And he loved that."