Daisy Werthan: Hoke?

Hoke Colburn: Yes’m.

Daisy Werthan: You’re my best friend.

Hoke Colburn: No, go on Miss Daisy.

Daisy Werthan: No, really, you are…

The script above created a misty-eyed moment in theaters around the world as Miss Daisy (played by Jessica Tandy) told her driver, Hoke (played by Morgan Freeman), how she felt about him. Driving Miss Daisy not only won five top Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Actor, Actress and Supporting Actor), it earned over $250 million worldwide. But, before there was the movie, there was Alfred Uhry.

Alfred Uhry was born in Atlanta in 1936. He attended Druid Hills High School (go Red Devils!), and after graduating, attended Brown University in Rhode Island. There, he received a degree in English and Drama. Uhry relocated to New York City, where he taught English at the Calhoun School. Druid Hills High School’s Uhry Theater is named in his honor.

In 1975, after several attempts at writing a successful play, he collaborated with Robert Waldman to adapt Eudora Welty’s short novel, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), into a musical. The production received a Tony Award nomination for Best Book of a Musical and marked Uhry’s first success as a playwright.

After many long years working in theater, he encountered his next big success in 1987. The play, Driving Miss Daisy, opened at the Studio Theater at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. The characters were inspired by Uhry’s grandmother and her chauffeur. Driving Miss Daisy was an immediate success and earned him the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The following year, Uhry wrote the screenplay adaptation of Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The movie was filmed in and around Atlanta and featured Druid Hills, Lullwater Road, Agnes Scott College, and The Temple. The film received the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Uhry received the award for Best Screenplay.

His next book, The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997), received lots of positive feedback as well. The Last Night of Ballyhoo was commissioned for the Olympic Arts Festival and debuted at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. In 1997, Ballyhoo received a Tony Award for Best Play, as well as the Outer Critics Circle Award.

The musical, Parade (1998), was released the following year. Parade tells the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager convicted of murdering a young girl in Atlanta. A mob removed Frank from his jail cell in Milledgeville one night and lynched him. In 1986, some seventy years later, the Georgia Board of Pardons reversed Frank’s conviction. Uhry’s great-uncle owned the factory where Frank worked, and his grandmother—his model for Miss Daisy—was a friend of the Frank family. This story is still being written about by Georgia authors, as Ann Hite’s soon-to-be-released novel, I Am a Georgia Girl, is based on Frank’s wife and his trial.

Parade was nominated for nine Tony Awards in 1999 and won two. His play, Angel Reapers premiered in 2011 and ran a revamped version Off-Broadway in 2016. This won the Lucille Lortel Award for “Outstanding Alternative Theatrical Experience.”

Uhry is also credited with writing other screenplays for popular movies, including Mystic Pizza (1988), featuring Julia Roberts, and Rich in Love (1992). He was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2014. Alfred Uhry currently lives in New York City.