Agnes Brand Leahy
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August 18, 1893
Agnes Brand Leahy | |
|---|---|
| Born | Agnes Laura Brand August 18, 1893 Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
| Died | March 31, 1934 (aged 40) San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Screenwriter |
Agnes Brand Leahy (August 18, 1893 – March 31, 1934) was an American screenwriter active in the 1920s and early 1930s.[1]
Agnes Laura Brand was born in Portland, Oregon,[2] and raised in Washington state, the daughter of Matthew Douglas Brand and Mila Hill Brand. Her father was a real estate agent.[3]
Career
Leahy and her husband relocated to Southern California in 1918[3] and secured jobs at the Paramount studio, she as a stenographer and he as a production manager. She moved into editing work, and ultimately becoming a scenarist at the studio.[4] "The average studio stenographer has a profound knowledge of screen material, production costs and picture making," she explained in 1931.[5]
Over the course of her career, she worked with filmmakers like John Ford,[6] Dorothy Arzner,[7] Joseph L. Mankiewicz,[8] and Frank R. Strayer. She often wrote Westerns; she wrote one of the first talking pictures starring Gary Cooper, The Spoilers (1930).[9] She adapted a Zane Grey story with Keene Thompson and Edward E. Paramore Jr., produced as another Gary Cooper vehicle, Fighting Caravans (1931).[9] She also co-wrote a satirical comedy, Forbidden Adventure (1931), based on Sinclair Lewis's Let's Play King.[10] She worked with Sidney Buchman and Percy Heath to adapt a Rupert Hughes novel into No One Man (1932) starring Carole Lombard.[11] Her last movie was Lone Cowboy (1933), a Western for child star Jackie Cooper.[12][13]
