John Lloyd Balderston
John Lloyd Balderston was an American playwright and screenwriter born on October 22, 1889, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He began his career in journalism, writing for the New York World and covering World War I, experiences that inspired his first play, *The Genius of the Marne* (1919). Balderston gained fame for adapting Bram Stoker's *Dracula* into a successful Broadway play in 1927, which later influenced the iconic 1931 film featuring Bela Lugosi. His innovative storytelling continued with *Berkeley Square* (1928), a time-travel love story that also transitioned to film. Throughout his career, Balderston contributed to various genres, particularly horror and science fiction, working on notable films like *Frankenstein* (1931) and *Gaslight* (1944). In the late 1940s, he adapted to the emerging television industry, writing for programs like *Studio One*. Balderston died on March 8, 1954, in Beverly Hills, California, leaving behind a legacy marked by significant contributions to American theater and film.
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Subject Terms
John Lloyd Balderston
Playwright
- Born: October 22, 1889
- Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Died: March 8, 1954
- Place of death: Beverly Hills, California
Biography
John Lloyd Balderston was born October 22, 1889, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In his youth, his taste for adventure fiction was also nurtured by the sensational and romantic journalism produced by the “circulation wars” between newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. By the time he was twenty, Balderston was writing for Pulitzer’s New York World.
Balderston was twenty-seven when war broke out in Europe in 1916, and the World sent him to cover what would become known as the “World War.” He later transmuted that experience into his first play, The Genius of the Marne (1919). The play’s protagonist was a thinly disguised version of himself, a war correspondent sending home prose-poems about the horrors of war while dreaming about writing the great American novel.
After the war, Balderston remained in Europe as the World’s London correspondent. When he returned to the home office in 1927, he was recruited to adapt Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula into a play for Broadway. His Dracula: The Vampire Play in Three Acts held the stage at the Fulton Theater for 261 performances from October, 1927, to May, 1928. An April, 1931, revival at the Royale only lasted eight nights, but by then Universal Pictures was ready to release Bela Lugosi’s now-classic film version with Balderston’s screenplay. When Frank Langella brought Dracula back to Broadway in 1977, he used Balderston’s original script, and it ran until 1980—in all, 925 performances.
Balderston’s second script for Broadway was his own idea, and it, too, became a classic plot, often imitated in science fiction film. Berkeley Square (1928) was a time-travel love story, in which a young man of the twentieth century goes back in time and falls in love with an eighteenth century woman. Once again, Balderston’s stage success (229 performances) was made into a Hollywood film (1933, remade as The House in the Square in 1951), and Balderston’s move to Hollywood was cemented.
At first, Universal kept Balderston in the horror genre: He helped adapt Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932), then cowrote sequels to both Dracula and Frankenstein: Mark of the Vampire (1935) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). His last Broadway play, Red Planet (1932), was in the related science fiction bracket: Radio broadcasts from Mars help a troubled and warlike earth to find peace (it was filmed as Red Planet Mars in 1952). For the rest of his long Hollywood career, Balderston would have a hand in more than thirty screenplays of all types, though largely action-adventure. Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935), The Last of the Mohicans (1936), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), and Gaslight (1944) were among the most significant.
In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Balderston made a move to the newer medium of television—one of the few established Hollywood writers who did—and he wrote teleplays for the ninety-minute drama venues showcased by the networks, such as Studio One (1948) and Prudential Family Playhouse (1950). One episode of Studio One was an adaptation of his successful stage and film creation, Berkeley Square. Balderston died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 8, 1954.