Plowright, who had previously appeared in films including “Enchanted April” and “Tea With Mussolini,” had been cast in “possibly her best role in the flickers,” movie critic Stephen Hunter wrote in The Post upon the film’s release. Lee and Mortimer Caplin arranged to fly her to London, where, to her surprise, Mrs. Then, in 1999, her son Lee Caplin - a movie producer whose credits would include the 2001 film “Ali” staring Will Smith - obtained the rights to make a film with his mother’s screenplay. She had never liked unhappy endings, her son said, and brightened some of the book’s darker moments in her screen adaptation.įor decades the script languished. Caplin, who referred to e-mails as “telegrams,” composed her work on a manual typewriter. Working on the screenplay, she said, allowed her to retreat to an “imaginary, quiet” place. Caplin took a degree of comfort in the story of a woman finding her way forward in grief. The Caplins’ 29-year-old daughter, Mary Ellen, had recently died from cancer, and Mrs. Caplin told The Washington Post, the book went to her heart. Palfrey at the Claremont,” centers on Laura Palfrey, who checks herself into a residential hotel for the elderly in London and finds relief from her loneliness in companionship with Ludo, an aspiring writer who becomes a surrogate grandson. Kennedy, when she happened upon the novel that would inspire her screenplay. Caplin was traveling in London in the late 1970s with her husband, Mortimer Caplin, a prominent Washington lawyer who served as IRS commissioner under President John F. She was 93 and had a heart ailment, said her son Michael Caplin. Based on a book by British novelist Elizabeth Taylor, the film recounted the spirit-sustaining friendship between an elderly widow and a young writer and was “a delight,” wrote film critic Roger Ebert, “in ways both expected and rare.” Palfrey at the Claremont,” directed by Dan Ireland and starring actress Joan Plowright, the widow of Laurence Olivier - was released in 2005. She bought a how-to guide to writing movie screenplays, and then she wrote one. She had been a writer all her life, just not a published one, and began the project more than three decades ago with little fanfare.
Ruth Sacks Caplin was 85 on her first opening night.
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