Lenore Coffee

Lenore Jackson Coffee (July 13, 1896 – July 2, 1984) was an American screenwriter, playwright, and novelist.

Born in San Francisco, in 1896, Lenore Coffee attended Dominican College in San Rafael, California. In 1918, she answered an ad in the Motion Pictures Herald Exhibitors, requesting a screen story for actress Clara Kimball Young. Coffee wrote a story treatment titled The Better Wife (1919), which was acquired by Harry Garson. He paid Coffee one hundred dollars and gave her screen credit. Garson soon hired her on a yearly contract, where she served as a continuity girl, assistant director, and made editing suggestions.

By 1920, Garson closed his studio, and Coffee found subsequent work in writing title cards and editing several films. In 1923, she was hired by Irving Thalberg, then working for Louis B. Mayer Pictures, to write title cards and adapt novels into scripts. A year later, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) was formed and Coffee continued her screenwriting career there. However, she left MGM after she had a salary dispute with Louis B. Mayer. Cecil B. DeMille later hired Coffee to write several films for him, including The Volga Boatman (1926). When sound films emerged, DeMille joined MGM and Coffee returned to writing numerous MGM films.

In 1937, Coffee left MGM again and wrote numerous scripts for Fox Film Corporation and Warner Bros. In 1939, she was jointly nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Four Daughters (1938) alongside Julius J. Epstein. Meanwhile, Coffee co-wrote a play titled Family Portrait: A Play in Three Acts with her husband William J. Cowen. At Warner Bros., Coffee wrote several women's films, including The Great Lie (1941) and Old Acquaintance (1943).

By the 1950s, Coffee published her first novel Weep No More. It was retitled in the United States as Another Time, Another Place and adapted into a 1958 film starring Lana Turner. Coffee then relocated her family to England. After her husband's death in 1964, she returned to California and retired to the Motion Picture And Television Home in Woodland Hills. In 1984, Coffee died at the age of 87.