As Williams’ (pretty humbling) note on the text indicates, it was the director’s vision that ultimately won out.

Kazan wanted a reluctant Williams to change the third act to one in which Maggie was shown more sympathetically, the dying Big Daddy reappeared, and Brick underwent some form of moral awakening.

Not-So-Fun Fact #1: Despite having already conquered Broadway with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), by 1955 Williams’ reputation had been dented by the failure of his most recent play, Camino Real, and the playwright was desperate for another win. Kazan, on the other hand, was coming off the runaway success of On the Waterfront (which won eight Oscars in 1954, including Best Picture and Best Director for Kazan). Set in the Mississippi plantation home of Big Daddy Pollit, a domineering cotton tycoon and patriarch of a viperous family in turmoil, on the dual occasion of his 65 th birthday and (alleged) clean bill of health, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof focuses on the tempestuous relationship between his grieving, alcoholic, probably closeted former star athlete son, Brick, and Brick’s fiery, outspoken, unapologetically sexual wife, “Maggie the Cat” his scheming elder son and daughter-in-law and their weaponized brood of “no-neck monsters” and the terminal cancer diagnosis of which all in the Pollit clan but Big Daddy and Big Mama have been made aware. Since this year marks the 65 th anniversary of the play’s Broadway premiere, I thought I’d track down some fun, and not-so-fun, facts about the many incarnations of Williams’ masterpiece.īut first things first, a brief recap of the story: If you’re a Tennessee Williams fan (and how could you not be), chances are you’ve seen the movie and/or some version of the original text (which Williams tinkered with and restored for the first Broadway revival in 1974, and which has been used for most revivals since). Indeed, you could argue that Cat has actually had three different lives since Williams dreamt it up in the early 1950s: Williams’ original text (initially buried but later revived), Elia Kazan’s original Broadway production (which won Williams the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955), and the Paul Newman- and Elizabeth Taylor-starring movie adaptation (which, despite its Hays Code neutering, was perhaps the most sexually-charged mainstream American film of the 1950s and an Oscar-nominated phenomenon back in 1958). Cat on a Hot Tin Roof-Tennessee Williams’ sultry southern storm of a play about greed, deceit, self-delusion, sexual desire and repression, homophobia, sexism, and the looming specter of death-has had a curious life.

Cat on a hot tin roof book