Eleanor Perry's screenwriting career covers only an eleven-year period, but it is still a remarkable one, including such films as David and Lisa (1962), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award, Last Summer (1969), and Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), all made under the direction of her husband Frank Perry. The screenplays of Eleanor Perry generally concentrated on an individual's search for identity, and in that sense they were reflective of her life: her career was full of struggle against the Hollywood establishment and against male domination in the motion picture business. Perry's fight for more power for women in the industry led her into producing in the 1970s, though only one of her proposed projects, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973), ever reached the screen, and that was a film over which she had little control.

Perry was born Eleanor Rosenfeld in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of...