Colin Higgins
Colin Higgins was a notable writer and filmmaker, best known for his cult classic film "Harold and Maude," which originated as his master's thesis. Born in Noumea, New Caledonia, and raised in Australia, Higgins pursued higher education at Stanford University and later at UCLA, where he studied filmmaking. His screenplay for "Harold and Maude," which tells the unconventional love story between a young man and an elderly woman, initially received mixed reviews but gained a dedicated following, particularly in France where it ran in theaters for over two years. Beyond "Harold and Maude," Higgins wrote several other successful screenplays, including "Silver Streak" and "Foul Play," as well as adaptations for theater, such as "Nine to Five" and "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." Despite his commercial successes, Higgins's work often explored themes of love and mortality. Tragically, his life was cut short at the age of forty-seven due to complications from AIDS, marking a poignant end to the career of a creative talent who made significant contributions to film and theater.
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Colin Higgins
Screenplay Writer
- Born: July 28, 1941
- Birthplace: Noumea, New Caledonia
- Died: August 5, 1988
- Place of death: Los Angeles, California
Biography
It is a rare master’s degree thesis that becomes a successful full-length film that goes on to achieve cult status, yet such was the fate of Colin Higgins’s Harold and Maude. Born in Noumea, New Caledonia, to John Edward Higgins, an American, and his wife Joy, an Australian, Colin went with his parents to live in Robertson, New South Wales, Australia, when he was nine. He completed his secondary education there with honors and, in 1959, entered Stanford University in California. While serving in the army for three years, he was associated with such publications as Bayonet, Arrow, and Stars and Stripes. Afterward, he attended the Sorbonne in Paris for six months before returning to Stanford to study creative writing with Wallace Stegner. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1967, signed on as a seaman on a freighter bound for Asia, and spent the summer traveling in Japan, Hong Kong, Macau, and other Pacific venues.
Returning to California, he entered a master’s program at the University of California at Los Angles (UCLA) to study film making. As part of his program, he made two short films. The UCLA Student Theatrical Society voted Higgins best actor of the year for his performance in the title role in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in 1969. Higgins persuaded Paramount Pictures to produce his film script, Harold and Maude, the unlikely story of a romance between a troubled, morbid adolescent and a seventy-nine-year-old woman on the verge of suicide.
The film did not receive favorable reviews, but it attracted devoted and enduring audiences. It was so well received in France that it played in one theater for more than two years. After Higgins adapted his screen play for the stage, it ran for four years in Paris. It was also produced in the United States, England, and throughout much of the world. Higgins used the screen play as the basis for a novel entitled Harold and Maude that appeared in 1971.
Higgins produced two new film scripts, Silver Streak and Foul Play, neither of which drew critical praise but both of which were commercially successful. With Dennis Cannon, he also collaborated on a stage adaptation of The Mountain People, Colin Turnbull’s novel that was filmed as The Ik. Silver Streak is a murder mystery reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934).
Higgins’s two most commercially successful ventures were his adaptation for film of Patricia Resnick’s Nine to Five (1980), which later became a television series, and of Larry King and Peter Masterson’s Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which Higgins adapted in collaboration with the original authors. Colin Higgins died in Los Angeles at age forty-seven of complications stemming from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).