Daisy drives down under

WHEN writer Alfred Uhry used his family history of growing up in the southern American city of Atlanta as the basis of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Driving Miss Daisy, he never dreamed that the touching story of the friendship between a Jewish matron and her black chauffeur would enthrall audiences for decades.

On the heels of the book’s success came an Oscar-winning film by Australian director Bruce Beresford and popular stage productions on Broadway and the West End.

Uhry is in Australia for the Sydney stage premiere on March 2 of Driving Miss Daisy starring Hollywood royalty – veterans Angela Lansbury, 87, and James Earl Jones, 82. The production will go to Melbourne in April.

“I’m excited to see the play in Australia – this is the first time that Angela Lansbury is starring in it,” says Uhry by phone from New York on the eve of his Australian visit.

“I have talked with Angela about doing this role for 25 years, so it is great that it has finally happened.

“James has done the play in both New York and London, along with Boyd Gaines [who plays Daisy’s son] – I don’t think that there could be a better cast.”

Lansbury plays 72-year-old Jewish widow Daisy Werthan, who drops her guard and learns over the years to trust her black chauffeur, Hoke Coleburn (Jones). As their friendship blossoms on the roads of Georgia and Alabama, they discuss many issues including race hatred and anti-Semitism, often delivered with a slice of humour.

“It still amazes me that Driving Miss Daisy is as popular as ever,” says Uhry, who won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Driving Miss Daisy.

“The first production was in a little theatre in a ratty part of New York City. The producer told me: ‘You told the truth and that always makes a playwright’.”

“I have learnt as a writer that if you write the truth, a lot of people will be able to relate to it.”

Uhry, 76, says the main character in the play is a combination of his mother and ­grandmother.

“I am also mixed in there – it was a big part of my childhood in Atlanta during the civil rights days.”

Uhry says that at first he was surprised at the response to Driving Miss Daisy. “But almost immediately people just wanted to see it.”

The work was given a major boost by the success of the 1989 film starring Jessica Tandy, who at 80 made history as the oldest Oscar winner in the Best Actress category.

The four Academy Awards that the film won at the 1989 ceremony – for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Makeup and Best Adapted Screenplay – was a fitting reward for Beresford, who had battled for several years with Hollywood moguls to make the film, despite achieving international acclaim for Breaker Morant.

In a recent interview, Beresford said that studio executives were not convinced that it would be a commercial success.

“Everyone was understandably wary about a film which was essentially an old, black man and an old Jewish lady chatting in a kitchen. You could see them reading the script and thinking, ‘who’s going to watch this?’”

Filming took only six weeks and included scenes in the Atlanta neighbourhood where Uhry’s parents raised him and his sister from the 1930s to the early 1950s.

It was while working with Beresford on the film that Uhry made his first visit to Australia.

Uhry grew up in Atlanta in a family of German Jews who were not religious.

“We didn’t celebrate Chanukah and I didn’t know what a seder was until I was grown up. I missed out on a lot,” he says.

Much of Uhry’s writing features Jewish characters living in the southern states of America.

After writing Driving Miss Daisy, the second part of the trilogy was The Last Night of Ballyhoo, published in 1996, which dealt with a Jewish family and was set around the premiere of the film Gone with the Wind in 1939.

The third part was a 1998 musical called Parade, about the 1913 trial of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank.

One of Uhry’s recent plays, Edgardo Mine, is based on the true story of Edgardo Mortara, an Italian child taken by police from his Jewish family in 1858 because one of their domestic servants had baptised him.

Uhry says he is interested in tackling the issues of racial prejudice.

“We have come a long way since those days – we have an African-American president and much of the south is integrated.”

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize and Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy, Uhry also won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1996 for The Last Night of Ballyhoo.

“The awards have not hurt my career,” Uhry says with a laugh while noting that they did not come until he was aged 50.

“It was a good thing that I had worked a long time before the awards, because I did not get a swelled head or believe my publicity.”

In the early days of his career, it wasn’t always plain sailing. His 1968 musical Here’s Where I Belong proved to be a box office disaster and closed after one performance.

“I had three children at the time and a fourth on the way, so it made me go and get a job. Fortunately the job was teaching theatre in a school so I was around plays, which made me think about playwriting. It worked out well.”

In the mid-1970s Uhry got his first Tony nomination for The Robber Bridegroom on Broadway. “It was a modest success,” he recalls.

Then came Driving Miss Daisy and he was showered with success.

“It was rewarding and led me to spend several years working in films in California, but it made me realise that I preferred the theatre. It may not give you the same kind of living, but it is what I wanted to do, so I am very happy living in New York.”

Uhry’s wife Joanna, a university professor, is not Jewish, but he says that raising his four children on Manhattan’s Upper West Side means they grew up culturally Jewish.

The Australian tour of Driving Miss Daisy began in Brisbane earlier this month and continues in Sydney (March 1-31), Melbourne (April 5-May 12), Adelaide (May 17-June 2) and Perth (June 8-16).

Lansbury’s film, theatre and TV career spans seven decades. She was nominated for an Oscar in her film debut in Gaslight (1944) and is well known for her TV series Murder She Wrote.

Jones made his Broadway debut in 1957 and has starred in many stage productions and films. Star Wars fans know him as the voice of Darth Vader while children heard him as Mufasa in The Lion King.

Gaines won four Tony Awards for Gypsy (2008), Contact (2000) and The Heidi Chronicles (1989) and She Loves Me (1994).

Driving Miss Daisy is being staged in Sydney at the Theatre Royal from March 1-31 and at the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne from April 5-May 12. Bookings: www.ticketmaster.com.au.

REPORT by Danny Gocs
PHOTO of Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones in Driving Miss Daisy. Photo: Jeff Busby