Ira Levin 1929-2007

Ira Levin, novelist, playwright and screenwriter, has died at the age of 78. His best known work included Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil - blockbuster novels that went on to become successful and influential hit films.

There are obituaries in all the major newspapers, including The L.A. Times and The Times.

Levin was an adept at creating an apparently mundane domestic atmosphere in which it gradually becomes clear to the reader that innocents are being hemmed around by evil from which there appears to be no escape. On the screen, the pallid features of Mia Farrow, as the young wife Rosemary, who has been drugged and impregnated, with her husband's connivance, by the seed of the Devil himself, came to be iconic for a generation. The atmosphere of evil that pervaded the screen had its origins in Levin's fictional skills.