Occupation Screenwriter, Actress | Books Mask: A Novel | |
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Nominations Academy Award for Best Writing Adapted Screenplay Movies Similar Lisa Loomer, Roy L Dennis, Susanna Kaysen, Tab Murphy, Dimitri Villard | ||
Anna Hamilton Phelan is an American actress and scriptwriter. She has been nominated for an Oscar for her work on Gorillas in the Mist, as well as a nomination for a Writers Guild of America Award for her work on Mask and again for Gorillas in the Mist.
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Education
Phelan studied theater arts at Emerson College in Boston. At Emerson, she studied under Syd Field where she wrote the screenplay for Mask. She was approached by the head of Universal Pictures at the time, Frank Price, who asked her to write the screenplay for Gorillas in the Mist.
Career
She then left Boston after her studies and moved to New York to pursue a career as an actress. She took a serious turn to scriptwriting when she "was in a television film as a dance hall girl and the producer recast her as the madam."
After that, she specialized her work as a scriptwriter on "women's parts, experience, and preference."
She has been known to go through extensive research prior to writing her films and roles. Before writing Into the Homeland, a film about a group of Neo-Nazi's who kidnap the daughter of an ex-cop, Phalan spent time at the headquarters of a far right organization in order to gain more knowledge of the roles she was writing.
Themes
She is known for writing strong women's roles, such as Cher's role in Mask (1984), as a caring and supportive mother towards her son who has a skull deformity, and Sigourney Weaver's part in Gorillas in the Mist (1988), who devotes her life to the study of primates and a strong fighter against illegal poaching in the African jungle. After Gorillas in the Mist, Sigourney Weaver told her "if you and other writers stop writing about female characters, then our daughters and granddaughters will have no female images on the screen to identify with at all" and Phelan took that as a responsibility of hers to keep creating positive roles for women on screen.
Phelan often writes strong female character roles and stories, as she feels it to be a responsibility of hers. The National Organization for Women has publicly supported the roles that she has written, calling the roles and the films "very pro female."