Moss Hart
When Moss Hart received the Tony Award for Best Director, the honor joined a body of formal recognition that already included the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Donaldson Awards — three distinct acknowledgments spread across different dimensions of theatrical work.
Born in New York City on October 24, 1904, Hart worked across multiple roles in the American theatre: playwright, librettist, theatre director, screenwriter, and theatrical producer. The combination was notable in its breadth. His writing earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, while the Donaldson Awards provided further recognition of his contributions. The Tony Award for Best Director confirmed that his abilities extended into staging as fully as they did into writing. He worked in English throughout his career as a citizen of the United States, occupying the overlapping territories of the page and the rehearsal room across several decades.
Hart died on December 20, 1961, in Palm Springs, at the age of fifty-seven. The three awards he received — the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Donaldson Awards, and the Tony Award for Best Director — stand as the concrete record of how his work as a playwright, librettist, and director was regarded during his lifetime.
Quotes by Moss Hart
Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one’s own.
Charity in the theatre usually begins and ends with people who have a play opening the week following one’s own. Their unlikely benevolence is not so much a purity of heart as the knowledge that they face a firing line with rifles aimed in exactly the same direction.
Without vanity a writer’s work is tepid, and he must accept his vanity as part of his stock in trade and live with it as one of the hazards of his profession.
So far as I know, anything worth hearing is not usually uttered at seven o’clock in the morning; and if it is, it will generally be repeated at a more reasonable hour for a larger and more wakeful audience.
I have always understood the unbelieving look in the eyes of those whom success touches early – it is a look half fearful, as though the dream were still in the process of being dreamed and to move or to speak would shatter it.
Boredom is the keynote of poverty – of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with – for where there is no money there is no change of any kind.
