Peg Fenwick

McCray was born in New York City[2] in 1907, daughter of Edward McCray, a lawyer, and his wife Anna Royce Carr.[3] When McCray was six years old, her mother died, and her father died in 1914 when she was seven.[3] McCray and her younger brother were adopted by Ellen Dustin Thompson and her husband William S. Thompson in 1917,[4] and added the surname Thompson to their names.[4] She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri,[2] where she attended the Sacred Heart Convent School and the Mary Institute.[5][6] She spent a year in France as a child, attending a school at St Germain, Paris,[5][6] and also had a Belgian governess.[6] She studied at the University of California at Los Angeles for a year,[2] then left and worked as a secretary for Hollywood director Rowland Lee.[2][6]

McCray worked at Paramount Pictures studio in New York, for four years.[5][6] She did no original writing during that time, but did some continuity writing,[5][6] and, fluent in French,[5][6] she worked on the French adaptation of Honor Among Lovers (then known as Strictly Business).[7] She moved to Paris, France, in about 1931.[5] Using the name Peggy Thompson, she worked for the Vandor Company on the English version of Don Quixote (1933).[5][8] She also wrote the story on which the film Remous (1935) was based.[5][8][6] Her original title for it was A Kiss in the Dark,[9][10] and she sold it for $5,000.[11] A contemporary review also credits Peggy Thompson for "cutting" (ie editing) the film, along with E. T. Gréville and Curt Alexander.[12] The film had made about $2,000,000 by the end of 1939, and McCray expressed regret that she had not sold it for a percentage of its earnings.[11] During 1935, she worked in England with Basil Dean at Associated Talking Pictures, Ealing.[6] There, she wrote the scenario for Midshipman Easy and assisted with the adaptation of Eleanor Smith's novel Ballerina for the screen[6] (its film title was The Men in Her Life). She also wrote skits for Gracie Fields.[6]

Remous was released in the US in 1939 as Whirlpool of Desire[8][13] after American film censors had banned it over several years.[11][14][15] By that time, McCray had worked on two films in the US, including King of the Newsboys (1938),[16] and a French film about Alpine life and sports,[11] which contained "no more sex".[11] She reportedly found it embarrassing to see billboards proclaiming, "See Peggy Thompson's 'Whirlpool of Desire' - hotter even than Ecstasy."[11]

In 1942, using the name Peggy Fenwick, she wrote a Christmas play called Among Those Present, which was performed at a church near Allentown, Pennsylvania.[17] During World War II, she worked for the United States Office of War Information Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) as a script reviewer. Among the films she reviewed were In Old Oklahoma,[18] A Song to Remember,[19] Gung Ho!,[20] Bataan,[21] and So Proudly We Hail!.[21]

In 1950, under the name Peg Fenwick, she wrote a stage play called Meet the World, which the Los Angeles Times described as "an impressive stage event",[22] in which Fenwick showed "considerable understanding of present-day international problems ... in the parallel she drew with the founding of the United States."[22] The play starred Jeff Chandler and celebrated accomplishments of UNESCO.[22]

Fenwick then worked for Universal International Pictures. She adapted Ben Lucien Burman's novel Blow for a Landing. The film, retitled Mississippi Landing, was to star Audie Murphy, though the project was ultimately shelved.[23] She also adapted the novel All That Heaven Allows by Edna Lee and Harry Lee into the screenplay for a film of the same name.[24] The film starred Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson and Agnes Moorehead.[25] The Evening Sun of Baltimore described Fenwick's script for All That Heaven Allows (1955) as "shrewdly and urbanely intelligent."[1]

Fenwick wrote her final script in about 1958.[8] During the 1960s, she worked for the U.S. State Department, advising on women's affairs in the Far East and Europe.[26]

She married Saul K. Padover, a professor and author, in 1957.[8][27] She was a member of the League of Women Voters,[8][26] and also worked as an activist in Brooklyn Heights to improve sanitation in the area in the 1970s.[8][28]

Her brother, Edward "Ted" McCray Thompson, was a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and St. Louis Star-Times and the author of a book called Leg Man. He died in 1957.[29][30]

Screen:

• Midshipman Easy (1935)
• Remous (1935)
• King of the Newsboys (1938)
• All That Heaven Allows (1955)[31]

Stage:

• Meet the World (1950)[22][23][32]
• The Rebellious Franklins (1958)[33]

• Peggy Thompson at IMDb