Violet Lucille Fletcher (March 28, 1912 – August 31, 2000) was an American screenwriter of film, radio and television. Her credits include The Hitch-Hiker, an original radio play written for Orson Welles and adapted for a notable episode of The Twilight Zone television series.
From 1934 to 1939, Lucille Fletcher worked as a music librarian, copyright clerk and publicity writer at CBS. There she met her future husband, composer Bernard Herrmann, who conducted the CBS orchestra.
Fletcher’s first success came when one of her magazine stories, “My Client Curley,” was adapted for radio by Norman Corwin. Broadcast on the Columbia Workshop March 7, 1940, it was later adapted for the 1944 Cary Grant film, Once Upon a Time.
Herrmann wrote the score for the November 17, 1941, radio debut of Fletcher’s famous story, The Hitch-Hiker on The Orson Welles Show.
Fletcher’s greatest success, Sorry, Wrong Number – our current offering – premiered on May 25, 1943, as an episode of the radio series Suspense. Agnes Moorehead created the role in the first performance and again in several later radio productions. It was broadcast nationwide seven times between 1943 and 1948.
Barbara Stanwyck starred in the 1948 film version of Sorry, Wrong Number and, in 1952, performed the original radio play over the airwaves. A 1959 version produced for the CBS radio series Suspense received a 1960 Edgar Award for Best Radio Drama. Two operas were based on the play, which Orson Welles called “the greatest single radio script ever written”.
Fletcher adapted the first part of the Emily Brontë novel Wuthering Heights into a libretto for Bernard Herrmann’s opera of the same name, conceived in 1943. He completed the opera in June 1951, by which time they had divorced. Fletcher said the opera was “perhaps the closest to his talent and heart.” The work was never produced on stage during Herrmann’s lifetime.
Sorry, Wrong Number, by Lucille Fletcher (Playing time: 20:21)
Starring Gretchen Evans, Don Stewart, Dan Gunther, Richard Hoag, Edie Talt, Leslie Ann Story, Danielle Aubuchon, David Newton, David Brainard, Jean Nicol, Loraine Hull Smithers and William Smithers
(An invalid woman overhears plans for a desperate crime.)
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