Playwright William McCleery, whose plays featured Franchot Tone, Jane Wyatt and Helen Hayes, died Jan. 16 in Princeton, NJ, according to The New York Times.
Mr. McCleery was 88 and lived in Princeton, where he was founding editor of "University: A Princeton Quarterly."
His Broadway plays in the 1940s were Hope For the Best with Tone and Wyatt, and Parlor Story with Walter Abel. Helen Hayes starred in his adaptation of Good Morning, Miss Dove, and Hayes and her daughter, Mary MacArthur, starred in Mr. McCleery's pre-Broadway play, A Play For Mary. That play's future was thwarted when MacArthur died of polio.
Mr. McCleery, a Nebraska native, was also a journalist for the Associated Press, an editor for Life, PM and Ladies Home Journal. He penned television plays that starred the likes of Hume Cronyn and Nanette Fabray.
-- By Kenneth Jones
