Rosemary Foley—actress, prolific playwright, and devoted civic spirit has left behind a legacy radiant with wit, generosity, community, and art. She brought joy, creativity, and inspiration to all who knew her.
Rosemary Foley—actress, prolific playwright, and devoted civic spirit has left behind a legacy radiant with wit, generosity, community, and art. She brought joy, creativity, and inspiration to all who knew her.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, Rosemary discovered the stage as her natural domain, acting and singing in productions at Mundelein College. Her gifts soon led her to study acting and improvisation under Viola Spolin and Paul Sills of Chicago’s famed Second City, performing with their ensemble while also using drama as a tool for social purpose and human connection at Hull House.
Her path carried her to New York City, where she appeared off-Broadway with the IRT Theater to favorable notice in The New York Times. When the stage grew less hospitable to women of advancing years, she turned her talents to writing. Over several decades she produced more than one hundred plays, stories, poems, and books—works marked by irony, insight, and delightful unpredictability. Her play Punch and Judy, brought forth by Jean Erdman and Joseph Campbell of Theater of the Open Eye, inaugurated a distinguished literary career. Named among the ten best women playwrights by Works by Women, she received the Festival of New Works prize for I’m Sorry, I’m Sorry (1990), the Havemeyer Award for Ophelia’s Mother (2004), and saw her play Oh, Promise Me—first staged at the Theatre Artists Workshop (TAW) in Norwalk, Connecticut, adapted into a film that screened at the Big Apple Film Festival and won Best Screenplay at The Mountain Film Festival in 2008. Continue reading – > – > – >