Born in Portland, Oregon October 16, 1931, died on December 9, 2019 in Green Valley, Arizona.

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Over the course of a forty year career, William Luce wrote plays, film scripts, and libretti for musicals, operas and oratorios.  He worked with the likes of Zoe Caldwell, George C. Scott, Claire Bloom and Christopher Plummer, staging the private lives of Charlotte Brontë, Lillian Hellman, John Barrymore, Isak Dinesen, and Zelda Fitzgerald.  But it’s as author of the 1976 Broadway hit, The Belle of Amherst, written for Julie Harris, that Luce is best known.  His stage biography of reclusive Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson won Harris her fifth Tony; her recording of the play won a Grammy in 1978.

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Proving that Luce could do for men what he did for women, his 1997 play Barrymore, about gifted and tragic actor John Barrymore, earned Christopher Plummer a Tony, and was filmed for television. 

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But Luce didn’t start out a playwright.  A published poet and professional pianist and organist, when he was tapped to write what became The Belle, Luce had never written a play. The play’s opening scene, in which Dickinson enters with a tea tray and blurts, “This is my introduction – black cake”, came to him, Luce recalled, in a dream during a nap taken after fruitless wrestling with the material. The rest of the play, he said, flowed from there. 

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Belle director Charles Nelson Reilly liked to joke that he had “pulled Bill from the chorus,” referring to Luce’s work in the Sixties as backup singer to performers like Julie London. (A fine baritone, Luce also performed and recorded with the Roger Wagner and Robert Shaw Chorales.)

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Luce liked to say, “Charles Nelson Reilly and Julie Harris taught me all I know about the theatre.”  It was a magic recipe which Luce replicated with several more plays for Harris, including Lucifer’s Child, a 1991 one-person show about Danish writer Isak Dinesen for which Harris received a Tony nomination. 

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Humorous as he was humble, Luce did not allow his head to be turned by fame.  His favorite Dickinson lines, spoken with a twinkle, were: “I’m Nobody – Who are You? Are you Nobody too?” Luce was predeceased by his partner of fifty years, designer Ray Lewis. 

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Luce's literary executor is author Grant Hayter-Menzies.  Contact: grantmenzies@gmail.com