Biography

Rose Caylor was newspaper reporter, author, screenwriter and playwright. She was born in Vilna, Russia (now Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1898, the daughter of Morris and Elizabeth Libman. Her father came to America in 1906 where he found work in Chicago as a department store salesman. Rose, her mother and two sisters joined him there the following year. Rose's older sister was the author and Jewish historian Anita Libman Lebeson (abt. 1897-1987) and her younger sister, Minna Libman Emch (abt 1904-1958), was a noted Chicago psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Rose graduated second in her class at the University of Chicago and went on to work as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. While at the Daily News she met and fell in love with writer Ben Hecht and moved to New York City with him in 1924. The next year they married after his divorce from writer Mary Armstrong was finalized. Over their almost forty year marriage Rose collaborated on a number of projects with her husband and helped as his assistant.

In 1930 she translated and adapted for Broadway Anton Chekhov's play "Uncle Vanya". Among her novels are "The Woman on the Balcony" (1927) and "The Journey" (1933).

Her only child Jenny Hecht was an actress who died of a drug overdose in 1971. Rose Caylor Hecht passed away in 1979. Her headstone at the Oak Him Cemetery in Nyack, New York bears the inscription "and rooks in families homeward go, and so do I." from the Thomas Hardy poem "Weathers".
- IMDb mini biography by: John F. Barlow