Phyllis Nagy

Phyllis Nagy ( ; born November 7, 1962) is an American theatre and film director, screenwriter and playwright. In 2006, Nagy was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for writing and directing Mrs. Harris (2005), her screen debut. In 2016, Nagy received an Academy Award nomination, among numerous other accolades, for Best Adapted Screenplay for the 2015 film Carol. Life and career Nagy was born in New York City and moved to London in 1992, where her playwriting career began in earnest at the Royal Court Theatre under the artistic direction of Stephen Daldry for whom she served as the Royal Court's writer-in-residence in the mid-1990s. Nagy's plays have been performed in many countries. They include Weldon Rising, first produced by the Royal Court Theatre in association with the Liverpool Playhouse in 1992; Butterfly Kiss , first produced by the Almeida Theatre Company in 1994 (not to be confused with the Michael Winterbottom film of the same name Butterfly Kiss); The Scarlet Letter, an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel, commissioned and first produced by the Denver Centre Theatre in 1994; Trip's Cinch, commissioned and first produced by the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1994 and received its UK premiere in 2002; The Strip, commissioned and first produced by the Royal Court Theatre in 1995; and Disappeared, a joint winner of both the 1992 Mobil International Playwriting Prize and the 1995 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Disappeared premiered at the Royal Court in 1995 in a production directed by the author which subsequently toured the UK before a London run at the Royal Court Theatre. The play went on to win the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Regional Play and the Eileen Anderson/Central Television Award for Best Play. In February 1999, Disappeared was presented at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago by RoadWorks Productions. Nagy's most recent plays are Never Land, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in January 1998, in a co-production with The Foundry; and The Talented Mr. Ripley, adapted from the novel by Patricia Highsmith which premiered at the Watford Palace Theatre, in October 1998, and later produced by the Melbourne Theatre Company in February 1999. Her version of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull was produced at Chichester Festival Theatre in the summer of 2003. In 2005, Nagy directed a production of The Scarlet Letter at the same venue.