Biographie

Had a torrid affair with Mary Astor, which was revealed in court during Astor's 1936 divorce trial when she was fighting her husband for custody of their daughter. Her personal diary, which detailed the physical pleasures Kaufman had given her during their affair, was introduced by her husband's lawyers to besmirch her reputation. The resulting scandal only seemed to make her more popular with the public, and likely led to her being cast in her most famous role as the vamp in Le faucon maltais (1941). Being publicly known as a stud did nothing to hurt Kaufman's reputation, either.

1951: Won Broadway's Tony Award as Best Director for "Guys and Dolls.".

He was only the second playwright to win two Pulitzer Prizes, the first being Eugene O'Neill.

2000: His play, "Merrily We Roll Along", became a Stephen Sondheim musical and was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best New Musical in 2001.

Inducted into the United States Croquet Hall of Fame in 1979.

When a community theater group was caught performing one of Kaufman's plays without permission or payment of royalties, Kaufman threatened to send them to jail for theft. The theater director thought they didn't need to pay royalties because, as he put it, "It's just a small, insignificant, little theater in a small, insignificant, little town." Kaufman's reply: "Then we'll send you all to a small, insignificant, little jail."

I like terra firma -- the more firma, the less terra.

(Upon seeing so many billboard ads with an alluring Jane Russell in Le banni (1943)) They ought to call it "A Sale of Two Titties".

[on writing for the Marx Brothers who were given to ad-libbing their dialogue] I may be wrong. But I think I just heard one of the original lines.

[advice to a writer who had a spelling problem] I'm not very good at it myself, but the first rule about spelling is that there is only one 'z' in 'is'.