Jean Rouverol

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Jean Rouverol (born July 8, 1916, in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American author, actress and screenwriter who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses in the 1950s.

Jean Rouverol first acted in a Hollywood motion picture at the age of seventeen, appearing as the daughter of W.C. Fields in the 1934 comedy It's a Gift. She continued to perform in mainly supporting roles, making another eleven films until 1940 when she married screenwriter Hugo Butler. With four children coming in quick order, Rouverol did not return to film acting but throughout the 1940s she performed on radio. While her husband was away in the U.S. military during World War II, Rouverol wrote her first novella that she sold to McCall's magazine in 1945. By 1950 she had her first screenplay made into a film but her career was interrupted as a result of the investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) into Communist influence in Hollywood.

In 1943 Rouverol and her husband had joined the American Communist Party. In 1951, when the agents for HUAC attempted to subpoena them, Rouverol, her husband, and their four small children chose self-exile to Mexico rather than face possible prison sentences like those imposed a few months earlier on some of their friends who were part of what was dubbed the "Hollywood Ten." Labeled as subversives and dangerous revolutionaries by the U.S, government, they did not return to the United States on a permanent basis for thirteen years during which time she had two more children.

While in exile, Rouverol continued to write screenplays. She also wrote short stories and articles for various American magazines to help earn money. Three screenplays she co-wrote with her husband were accepted for filming by the Hollywood studios because agent Ingo Preminger (brother of director Otto Preminger) arranged for friends from the Writers Guild of America to put their name on the script in place of Rouverol and her husband.

In 1960 the family moved to Italy so she and her husband could work on a film script. After a few years, they returned briefly to Mexico and in 1964 Rouverol and her family came home to the United States for good. Living in California again, she and her husband continued their screenplay collaboration plus she wrote a book on Harriet Beecher Stowe. However, her husband was diagnosed with arteriosclerotic brain disease and died in 1968.

In the 1970s, Jean Rouverol returned to writing books and the script for an episode of the television series, Little House on the Prairie. After publishing three books in three years, she was hired as co-head writer for the CBS soap opera Guiding Light. For this show she received a Daytime Emmy nomination and a Writers Guild of America Award. Rouverol, by then sixty years old, left the show in 1976 and would begin a book about writing for soap operas. She taught writing at the University of Southern California and at UCLA Extension. She also wrote scripts for Search for Tomorrow and As the World Turns.

Jean Rouverol served four terms on the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America and in 1987 she received the Guild's "Morgan Cox Award" as a member whose vital ideas, continuing efforts and personal sacrifice best exemplified the ideal of service to the guild.

In 2000, the very active eighty-four-year-old Rouverol published Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years that told the story of her family's life in exile.

Screenplays: