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JEAN KERR was noted for the sharp wit she brought to her writing for the theatre, and the hilariously droll essays she composed about a Broadway-permeated life in suburbia. Her plays include Mary, Mary, one of the longest- running plays in Broadway history, but her greatest fame came with the publication of her book Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Based on her life in the country suburb of Larchmont, New York, with her theatre critic husband, four sons and assorted pets, it was an international hit that later became a successful film and a television series.
Kerr, who was frank about her dislike of cooking, housework and rising early (all traits which did not sit well with her suburban neighbours) would rise at noon then retreat to her Chevrolet, parked several blocks away, where she could write without the surrounding chaos of children and pets. "The thing about having a baby," she once said, "is that, thereafter, you have it."
Her solution was to earn some money and thus be able to afford to have someone else rise early to tend to the children (she ultimately had six). At the height of her fame, Kerr told The Los Angeles Times, "It's pretty good for a girl who tried writing to justify not doing the dishes."
Born Bridget Jean Collins to Irish immigrant parents in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1922, she was educated at Marywood Seminary and Marywood College in Scranton. A lover of theatre from an early age, she was stage manager of a college production of Romeo and Juliet when she met Walter Kerr, then a professor of drama at Catholic University in Washington. The couple were married in 1943 ("I was looking to marry a man smarter than I was," said Kerr), and the marriage lasted until Walter's death in 1996. (Walter Kerr was to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning theatre critic for the New York Herald- Tribune and The New York Times.)
Jean, who received a master's degree from Catholic University in 1945, joined her husband on the faculty, and together they wrote their first play, written for and produced by the theatre department of the university. It was an adaptation of Franz Werfel's 1941 novel Das Lied von Bernadette (translated as The...