Stroke and Death
In 1950, Robert Riskin suffered a debilitating stroke that prevented him from writing additional scripts. His last screenplays, still in the pipeline, were produced between 1950 and 1951. Ironically, Frank Capra was assigned to Riskin's last original story, Here Comes the Groom, which he directed in 1951. Years after Riskin's death in 1955, Capra directed a remake of the 1933 film "Lady for a Day," which Riskin had written from a short story by Damon Runyon and Capra had directed. The 1961 version, with a screenplay by Hal Kanter and Harry Tugend from the Riskin-Runyon material was titled "A Pocketful of Miracles". The film became Capra's last.
Upon his death on September 20, 1955, Riskin was in the 13th year of marriage to actress Fay Wray. Riskin had two children and one adopted daughter with Wray, including Susan (born 1936, adopted 1942), Robert (born 1943), and Victoria (born 1946). Interment Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood California.
A biography by Ian Scott, In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin, was published in 2006 by the University Press of Kentucky.
Read more about this topic: Robert Riskin
Famous quotes containing the words stroke and/or death:
“Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? “And here is my good big centipede!” If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)