George Kelly

Kelly, George [Edward] (1887–1974), playwright. The Philadelphia‐born dramatist entered the theatre when he was twenty‐one, playing juvenile roles, then drifted into vaudeville where he performed in his own sketches. Kelly's first successful play was the satire The Torch‐Bearers (1922), followed by three popular works: the comedy The Show‐Off (1924), the penetrating character study Craig's Wife (1925), and the romantic Daisy Mayme (1926). After writing sketches for the revue A la Carte (1927), he produced a series of plays that could not find an audience: Behold the Bridegroom (1927), Maggie the Magnificent (1929), Philip Goes Forth (1931), Reflected Glory (1936), The Deep Mrs. Sykes (1945), and The Fatal Weakness (1946). At his best Kelly was a superb technician, trenchant observer, and satirist of human folly. But a certain coldness and misanthropy eventually made his later plays unpalatable to most critics and theatregoers. His older brother Walter C. KELLY (1873–1939) was a pudgy vaudeville comic who was famous for his hilarious courtroom sketch. Their other brother was John B. Kelly, the Olympic sculler, and they were uncles of Princess Grace of Monaco.

Kelly, George, 1887–1974, American playwright, b. Philadelphia. He began his career as a vaudevillian, as both an actor and skit writer. His best-known plays, penetrating satires on American middle-class life, include The Torch-Bearers (1922), The Show-off (1924), Craig's Wife (1925; Pulitzer Prize), and The Deep Mrs. Sykes (1945).

(1887-1974)

1922	The Torch-Bearers. Kelly's first major dramatic success is this comedy about the little theater movement, in which a housewife steps in suddenly as the lead in an amateur production. The Philadelphia-born playwright was the brother of vaudevillian Walter C. Kelly and the uncle of the actress and later princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly.
1924	The Show-Off. Hailed by critic Heywood Broun as "the best comedy which has yet been written by an American," Kelly's play about a braggart's marriage is selected by the Pulitzer Prize drama jury. Their decision, however, is overturned by the Pulitzer board, who award the prize to Hatcher Hughes for his melodrama Hell-Bent for Heaven, amid charges of bias in favor of Hughes, a Columbia University professor and colleague of many of the board members.
1925	Craig's Wife. Kelly's Pulitzer Prize-winning character study concerns an obsessive wife dominated by her possessions. In the play's climax her husband rebels by breaking a favorite knickknack and daring to smoke in the house.
1926	Daisy Mayme. Kelly's comedy about the romance between a set-in-his-ways middle-aged bachelor and an unfashionable spinster is noteworthy for its trenchant portrait of American snobbery and family dynamics.
1927	Behold the Bridegroom. Opening on the busiest night in Broadway history (December 27) with ten other plays, Kelly's drama about a disillusioned society woman is considered the playwright's closest approximation of a tragedy.
1936	Reflected Glory. The former Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright has only a modest success after a five-year layoff from the stage with this drama. In it an actress struggles between the conflicting demands of her career and a desire for marriage and family.