Biography
Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama. At age 33, after years of obscurity, Williams suddenly became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Nam...
Known For
Complete Filmography

A Lady’s Beaded Bag
2024
Adaptation
Three characters from different social backgrounds—a homeless man, a maid, and her boss—each have a unique relationship with a single lost item: a pea...

The Glass Menagerie
2021
Writer
An aging Southern Belle makes life horrible for her ambitious son and crippled daughter because of her dreams of what life should be.

Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation
2021
as Self - Playwright (archive footage)
The parallel lives of writer Truman Capote (1924-84) and playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-83): two friends, two geniuses who, while creating sublim...

National Theatre Live: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
2018
Writer
Tennessee Williams’ twentieth century masterpiece Cat on a Hot Tin Roof played a strictly limited season in London’s West End in 2017. An alcoholic ex...

National Theatre Live: A Streetcar Named Desire
2014
Theatre Play, Writer
As Blanche’s fragile world crumbles, she turns to her sister Stella for solace – but her downward spiral brings her face to face with the brutal, unfo...

And the Oscar Goes To...
2014
as Self (archive footage)
The story of the gold-plated statuette that became the film industry's most coveted prize, AND THE OSCAR GOES TO... traces the history of the Academy ...

Le Paradis sur terre
2011
Writer

Here Without Me
2011
Screenplay
The story is about the world of a small family with familiar dreams and not so remarkable problems. The mother is trying to lead everything to save he...

Beautiful Darling
2010
as Self (archive footage)
James Rasin's documentary “Beautiful Darling” honors American Transgender actress and best-known Warhol Superstar, Candy Darling, and her all-too-brie...

The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
2008
Writer
Tells the story of Fisher Willow, the disliked 1920s Memphis débutante daughter of a plantation owner with a distaste for narrow-minded people and a p...

Suddenly, Last Summer
2007
Writer
The only son of wealthy widow Violet Venable dies while on vacation with his cousin Catherine. What the girl saw was so horrible that she went insane;...

Akale
2004
Theatre Play
Margaret's dream of getting her differently abled daughter married shatters when she finds that the boy she chooses for her is engaged to someone else...

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
2003
Novel
An aging actress' husband dies of a heart attack en route to Rome, where they'd planned to holiday. There, she rents an apartment and, through the Con...

The Yellow Bird
2002
as Narrator (voice)
A young girl escapes the boredom of a small town existence in the 1930s.

The Yellow Bird
2002
Writer
A young girl escapes the boredom of a small town existence in the 1930s.

Desire
2002
Idea
Layla lives a peaceful life with her husband Hossam in one of the coastal cities. When her older sister Nemat comes to live with her after facing fina...

A Streetcar Named Desire - The San Francisco Opera World Premiere
1998
Writer
As Blanche’s fragile world crumbles, she turns to her sister Stella for solace – but her downward spiral brings her face to face with the brutal, unfo...

A Streetcar Named Desire
1995
Writer
A fading Southern Belle moves in with her sister in New Orleans where her ferocious brother-in-law takes stabs at her sanity.

Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of the American Stage
1994
as Self (archive footage)
A study of Tennessee Williams's life and work as a whole, ranging from his youth in Mississippi and in St. Louis to success and acclaim, followed by t...

Suddenly, Last Summer
1993
Author, Writer
The only son of wealthy widow Violet Venable dies while on vacation with his cousin Catherine. What the girl saw was so horrible that she went insane;...

Rubber Woman
1991
Author
The sculptor lives as a hermit in the country, drinking vodka with a local cheerful drunkard and "sealing plaster piglets" for his wife, who sells the...

Orpheus Descending
1990
Writer
Val Xavier is a drifter in 1940's Mississippi who brings new life to an Italian immigrant woman trapped in a loveless marriage.
Een vreemde liefde
1990
Writer
A lonely man tossed by life and hectored by his landlady finds happiness only with an alley cat.
27 Wagons Full of Cotton
1990
Writer
In order to boost his own cotton ginning business, Jake Meighan sets the local Syndicate Plantation ablaze. the superintendent of the Syndicate Planta...

Sweet Bird of Youth
1989
Writer
Tennessee William’s masterful melodrama about an aging movie star who, appalled by her own image on the screen, flees from her movie premiere and goes...

Трамвай «Желание»
1989
Writer

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
1989
Original Story
An alcoholic ex-football player drinks his days away, having failed to come to terms with his sexuality and his real feelings for his football buddy w...

The Glass Menagerie
1987
Writer
An aging Southern Belle makes life horrible for her ambitious son and crippled daughter because of her dreams of what life should be.

A Streetcar Named Desire
1987
Novel
As Blanche’s fragile world crumbles, she turns to her sister Stella for solace – but her downward spiral brings her face to face with the brutal, unfo...

Orpheus Descends to Hell
1986
Writer

Alfarysa
1986
Writer

Noir et blanc
1986
Original Story
Antoine is an accountant, uptight and withdrawn, married to Edith, who picks out his clothes and shoes. He's assigned to a fitness gymnasium for a mon...

The Piper
1985
Novel
Al-Zamar Hassan is on the run after he was an Engineering student and presented a play with the acting team in the Faculty that the authorities didn't...

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
1984
Theatre Play, Writer
An alcoholic ex-football player drinks his days away, having failed to come to terms with his sexuality and his real feelings for his football buddy w...

A Streetcar Named Desire
1984
Theatre Play
As Blanche’s fragile world crumbles, she turns to her sister Stella for solace – but her downward spiral brings her face to face with the brutal, unfo...

Bourbon Street Blues
1979
Writer
An adaptation of Tennessee Williams' "The Lady Larkspur Lotion" created by Douglas Sirk with the assistance of his film students and Rainer Werner Fas...

Sweet Bird of Youth
1978
Author
The play based on the play of the same name by T. Williams at the Moscow Academic Art Theater.

Cat on Fire
1977
Writer, Original Story
Contractor Mahmoud Abdel Majeed is afflicted with cancer, and his children hide the truth about his illness from him. This man has two sons, the eldes...

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
1976
Writer
An alcoholic ex-football player drinks his days away, having failed to come to terms with his sexuality and his real feelings for his football buddy w...

Talk to Me Like the Rain
1976
Writer
A small-scale, bare room situation involving a man and a woman who are bound together in an endless cycle by their hopeless poverty. Tennessee William...

The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
1976
Writer
The tale of a lonely Southern woman's longing for her handsome next-door neighbor. At once tragic and romantic, the story is a reworking of the Willia...

The Migrants
1974
Story
A look at the lives of migratory farm workers, focusing on one family.

The Glass Menagerie
1973
Theatre Play
Amanda Wingfield dominates her children with her faded gentility and exaggerated tales of her Southern belle past. Her son plans escape; her daughter ...

Tennessee Williams' South
1973
The brutes and the belles. The gadflies and the good ol' boys. The taboos and the profound truths. They're all part of a tennessee state of mind -- a ...

Last of the Mobile Hot Shots
1970
Theatre Play
A new bride gets caught between her decadent husband and his black half-brother.

Dragon Country
1970
Theatre Play
Producer-director Glenn Jordan brought together two Tennessee Williams plays, written twenty years apart, that examine the theme of isolation with sea...
The Glass Menagerie
1969
Novel
An aging Southern Belle makes life horrible for her ambitious son and crippled daughter because of her dreams of what life should be.

Boom!
1968
Writer, Original Film Writer
Explores the confrontation between the woman who has everything, including emptiness, and a penniless poet who has nothing but the ability to fill a w...
Hilsen fra Bertha
1968
Writer
A prostitute suffers schitzoid dillusions while grasping on to her past loves. She is stricken with "acquired" diseases.

The Glass Menagerie
1966
Writer
An aging Southern Belle makes life horrible for her ambitious son and crippled daughter because of her dreams of what life should be.

Ten Blocks on the Camino Real
1966
Writer
A collection of ten vignettes by Tennessee Williams offering various viewpoints on life, love, and death.

This Property is Condemned
1966
Theatre Play
Owen Legate, a railroad official, comes to Dodson, Mississippi to shut down the local railway - the town's main income. But Owen unexpectedly finds l...
Orpheus steigt herab
1965
Writer
In the Jim-Crow South, Val Xavier is a bass-playing drifter who retains a wild, compassionate spirit amid neon-lit decay. Nicknamed “Snake Skin” for h...

The Night of the Iguana
1964
Theatre Play
A defrocked Episcopal clergyman leads a bus-load of middle-aged Baptist women on a tour of the Mexican coast and comes to terms with the failure haunt...

Period of Adjustment
1962
Theatre Play
A newlywed couple on their honeymoon visit friends who are having marital problems of their own.

Sweet Bird of Youth
1962
Theatre Play, Writer
Gigolo and drifter Chance Wayne returns to his hometown as the companion of a faded movie star, Alexandra Del Lago, whom he hopes to use to help him b...

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
1961
Novel
Critics and the public say Karen Stone is too old -- as she approaches 50 -- for her role in a play she is about to take to Broadway. Her businessman ...

Summer and Smoke
1961
Theatre Play
In a small Mississippi town in 1916, an eccentric spinster battles her romantic yearnings for the randy boy next door.

The Fugitive Kind
1960
Screenplay, Original Film Writer
Val Xavier, a drifter of obscure origins, arrives at a small town and gets a job in a store run by Lady Torrence. Her husband, Jabe M. Torrance, is dy...

Suddenly, Last Summer
1959
Theatre Play, Screenplay
The only son of wealthy widow Violet Venable dies while on vacation with his cousin Catherine. What the girl saw was so horrible that she went insane;...

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
1958
Theatre Play, Writer
An alcoholic ex-football player drinks his days away, having failed to come to terms with his sexuality and his real feelings for his football buddy w...

Three Plays by Tennessee Williams
1958
Writer
A presentation of Tennessee Williams' three one-act plays: "Moony's Kid Don't Cry", "The Last of My Solid Gold Watches", and "This Property Is Condemn...

Baby Doll
1956
Screenplay, Theatre Play
Archie Lee Meighan is a failing cotton gin owner who is married to Baby Doll, a 19-year old childlike beauty whose father arranged the marriage for fi...

The Rose Tattoo
1955
as Man at Mardi Gras Club (uncredited)
A grieving widow embarks on a new romance when she discovers her late husband had been cheating on her.

The Rose Tattoo
1955
Screenplay, Theatre Play
A grieving widow embarks on a new romance when she discovers her late husband had been cheating on her.

Senso
1954
Dialogue
A troubled and neurotic Italian Countess betrays her entire country for a self-destructive love affair with an Austrian Lieutenant.

A Streetcar Named Desire
1951
Theatre Play, Screenplay
A disturbed, aging Southern belle moves in with her sister for solace — but being face-to-face with her brutish brother-in-law accelerates her downwar...
The Screen Director
1951
as Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
A documentary short film depicting the work of the motion picture director. An anonymous director is shown preparing the various aspects of a film for...

The Glass Menagerie
1950
Screenplay, Theatre Play
An aging Southern Belle makes life horrible for her ambitious son and crippled daughter because of her dreams of what life should be.
Camino Real
N/A
Story
A group of people in a small, isolated desert town through a series of strange events, begin to come to terms with growing older.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
N/A
Theatre Play
An alcoholic ex-football player drinks his days away, having failed to come to terms with his sexuality and his real feelings for his football buddy w...