Frederick Knott

Playwright who sold the rights to his best-known play, 'Dial M for Murder', for £1,

Frederick Major Paul Knott, playwright and screenwriter: born Hankow, China 28 August 1916; married 1953 Ann Hillary (one son); died New York 17 December 2002

Though not a prolific playwright, Frederick Knott wrote two enormously successful stage thrillers, Dial M for Murder and Wait Until Dark. Both had long runs on Broadway and in the West End, and both were later made into films, the former by Alfred Hitchcock, and the latter starring Audrey Hepburn.

Dial M for Murder is a classic among plays about homicide, a masterpiece of construction and intricate plotting involving an ingenious plan by a man to have his wife killed, and the subsequent cat-and-mouse game he plays with a police investigator after the wife kills the would-be assassin. The play's initial path to success was a chequered one. Turned down by several managements, it was transmitted by BBC Television and won immediate approval from viewers and acclaim from the press. Stage productions at the Westminster Theatre in London and the Plymouth Theater in New York followed, then the movie, but the author had sold the film rights to Alexander Korda for £1,000 after the television broadcast.

He received payment for writing the screenplay for Hitchcock's film version (though nothing like the amount Korda received from Warner Bros for the rights) and he received nothing except a credit for the later remake, A Perfect Murder. The play's enduring popularity and endless revivals all over the world plus the later success of Wait Until Dark ensured that the author could live comfortably, despite his small output.

The son of missionaries, Knott was born in Hankow, China, in 1916, and had his early education at the Griffith John Memorial College, a Quaker establishment. His introduction to the theatre came through the Hankow Operatic Society, which performed Gilbert and Sullivan every Christmas. Knott and his sister Jean saw HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Gondoliers, and Jean later recalled that they acquired the lyrics and records of the songs and would perform HMS Pinafore in their garden with Knott directing.

Frederick Knott was descended from a line of wealthy Lancashire mill-owners, and in 1926 his parents sent him to England, where he studied at Sidcott and Oundle School before going up to Cambridge in 1934. An exceptionally fine tennis player (a profession he gave the central character in Dial M for Murder), he became a Blue and in 1937 he was a member of the Oxford-Cambridge tennis team that played the Harvard-Yale squad at Newport. It was only the advent of the Second World War that prevented his competing at Wimbledon. He graduated in 1938, then served during the war in the Artillery as an instructor in signals, ending his service with the rank of major.

In 1948 Knott's parents bought a smallholding in Crawley, West Sussex, and it was in a chalet in the property's garden that he wrote Dial M for Murder. He later said that the inspiration for the play was the bang of a gun going off in an old, oak-panelled house (probably his grandfather's country mansion in Wilmslow, Cheshire). It took him 18 months, and there were times when the creative effort was such that he remained in his dressing gown and his mother would leave meals for him at the door.

The struggle to write the play was followed by an even greater one to get it produced. Knott sent it to seven different theatre managements, all of whom rejected it, one writing him a letter complimenting the "ingenious little plot" but adding that "the play as a whole would cause little interest". Knott was thinking of tearing the script up when the BBC accepted it.

The transmission, early in 1952, was a great success, and among its viewers was an agent for Alexander Korda, who advised his boss to buy the screen rights. Knott, told that the play's television transmission made a film version an unlikely prospect, sold the rights to Korda for £1,000. He also agreed to a clause in the contract stating that any stage production of the play would have to be withdrawn if and when a film was ever ready for release. This deterred most West End managements, but a North Country businesman, J.P. Sherwood, who had a lease on the Westminster Theatre, had a gap to be filled when a production fell through and decided to take a chance on staging the play at a moderate cost. It opened in June 1952, after only three weeks' rehearsal, with many of the television cast members, including the leading man Emrys Jones.

During that time the actor Maurice Evans read the play when he and Jones were at the same house party, and became excited at the thought of presenting it in New York with himself in the lead. Since he was about to start work on the film The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (playing Sullivan) for Alexander Korda's film company, he was able to persuade Korda to waive the proviso regarding a film release, and he acquired the right to present the play in America. He later wrote,

The opening night at the Westminster was a triumph and on the following morning, after the reviews, the Shubert Brothers and the Theatre Guild were falling over each other to snap up the American rights, only to be told that I had beaten them to the post.

Evans was to describe Knott as

a particularly meticulous writer. The fascinating web of clues, counterclues, and red herrings that so intrigued theatre audiences is typical of the way his mind works. Like the form of his tennis-playing villain whom I portrayed in Dial M for Murder, every detail of his plot is

placed with the deadly accuracy of a stroke in a championship tournament.

Evans also praised Knott's ready acceptance to make minor changes to the play to accommodate American tastes and colloquialisms. The secret with which the villain blackmails an old school chum was changed from misappropriation of school funds to drug peddling, and, since the M in the title refers to the villain's phone exchange, Maida Vale, which would mean nothing to American audiences, the heroine's name was changed to Margot.

The play's Broadway opening in October 1952 was as big a success as the London one, The New York Times stating that it "tingles with excitement" and the New York Mirror saying that it "holds your attention like a vice". It ran for 16 months and then toured. During the next five years the play was seen in 30 countries, and it has since been a staple of repertory and amateur groups.

Knott wrote the screenplay of Hitchcock's film, released in 1954, which starred Ray Milland as the scheming husband, Grace Kelly as his wife, and featured John Williams recreating his stage performance as the Inspector. The director became a close friend of Knott, who stayed with the Hitchcocks throughout the filming, during which the director presented him with his own named chair on the set alongside those of the stars. The film was made in 3-D, but the brief fashion for the process was fading by the time it was released and most cinemas showed the conventional version.

Regarded as lesser Hitchcock (he made it as the final film on a contract with Warner Bros and shot it in just 36 days), it is excessively long, but it grips for most of the time due to Knott's superb plotting and several sly Hitchcock touches. The property was filmed three times more, as a bland television movie in 1981 starring Christopher Plummer and Angie Dickinson, as an Indian film, Aitbaar (1985), and in 1998 as A Perfect Murder with Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow. Its plot was also used for an episode of the television series 77 Sunset Strip entitled "The Fifth Stair".

In 1952, during the play's run on Broadway, Mary Orr, wife of the its director Reginald Denham (and author of the story All About Eve), gave a party, her guests including Knott and the actress Ann Hillary, then appearing on television in The Aldrich Family. "I took one look at Frederick," Hillary told me,

and was absolutely fascinated. When I got home that evening, I rang Mary and asked her to tell me more about him. She replied, "He has just rung me asking the same about you." '

A romance ensued, and the following year Knott and Hillary were married. They had one son, and the marriage was described by Hillary as "a marriage as perfect as any I can imagine". After living in Princeton, New Jersey, while bringing up their son, the couple moved to New York, a city which Knott loved.

In 1952 Knott adapted a James Hadley Chase play as a movie, The Last Page, made in Britain with two fading Hollywood stars, George Brent and Marguerite Chapman, with Raymond Huntley and Diana Dors in a strong supporting cast. Directed by Terence Young, it was a modest but effective thriller. Knott had a moderate success with another ingenious play, Write Me a Murder (1961), which ran for six months on Broadway with Denholm Elliott and Ethel Griffies, two British performers, heading the cast. A reworking of Ben Jonson's Volpone entitled Mr Fox of Venice was a failure but it was filmed by Joe Mankiewicz as The Honey Pot (1967), considered overlong and over-talkative despite a distinguished cast including Rex Harrison, Susan Hayward and Maggie Smith.

Knott's second smash-hit came in 1966 with the tense thriller Wait Until Dark, which starred Lee Remick as the blind heroine terrorised by a group of murderous crooks until she smashes all the light-bulbs in her apartment and takes on their leader in pitch darkness. It proved an even bigger hit in London, where it starred Honor Blackman, followed by Barbara Murray during its two-year run. Terence Young's 1967 film version won an Oscar nomination for its star Audrey Hepburn and proved a popular success. In 2001 it was revived on Broadway in a controversial production featuring Quentin Tarantino as chief villain.

Knott and his wife led an active social life in Manhattan, and Knott was noted for his lively wit and zest for life. Though he had sketched out a couple of plays in his head, he never put them on paper. He made enough from his three plays to live comfortably and, said his wife, "I don't think the drive was there any more. He was perfectly happy the way things were."

Tom Vallance