Alice Arlen co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Silkwood with Nora Ephron. Directed by Mike Nichols, Silkwood was Arlen’s screenwriting debut; it explored the real story of Karen Silkwood, played by Meryl Streep, who died in suspicious circumstances while trying to reveal the dangerous practices in her workplace to a reporter.
Arlen and Ephron had been friends for years and shared a background in journalism. Both felt a responsibility to the story. “Having Meryl Streep involved in the project from the beginning was very helpful,” Ephron said. “We knew that she would be able to play a complicated young woman so we were going to be free to write one.”
Born in 1940, Alice Reeve was the daughter of a lawyer, Jay Frederick Reeve, and a journalist, Josephine Medill Patterson. Arlen’s great-great-grandfather, Joseph Medill, owned the Chicago Tribune; her grandfather, Joseph Medill Patterson, founded The Daily News in New York, and her great-aunt, Eleanor Medill Patterson, published The Washington Times-Herald.
Educated at Radcliffe College and Columbia university, Arlen started out as a freelance journalist based in Chicago. She had three children — Alicia, who became an actress, James Patrick and Robert — with her first husband, the newspaper executive James Hoge. In 1966, she published her first book: a biography of her great-aunt Eleanor.
Arlen and Hoge were divorced in 1970. She married the journalist and author Michael J Arlen, moving with him to New York, where she cultivated her interest in cinema. She collaborated regularly with Ephron during the 1980s: on Cookie, the story of a mafia boss and his daughter who decide to pull a con together, and a screenplay about the Pulitzer prizewinning reporter Maggie Higgins, who covered the Korean war for the New York Herald-Tribune.
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In more recent years, Arlen was behind the screenplay for Then She Found Me, which she co-wrote with the actress Helen Hunt. Her notable work also included the screenplay for Louis Malle’s Alamo Bay. Talking about the film, the ever modest Arlen recalled being starstruck by the French director. “The phone rang one morning and it was my agent, and he said, ‘I’m sitting here with Louis Malle. Would you like to talk to him?’. I was absolutely stunned. Then Louis got on the phone and I said, ‘I’m honoured’, and that’s all I could think of to say.”
Alice Arlen, screenwriter, was born on November 6, 1940. She died on February 29, 2016, aged 75