On December 28 at 9PM, PBS's acclaimed series American Masters presents the first film biography of an American icon - Louisa May Alcott. Starring as Louisa is the acclaimed Elizabeth Marvel whose New York theatre credits including "Top Girls," "Fifty Words," the Public Theater Productions of "Troilus and Cressida" and "King Lear," the Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry V," and more. Elizabeth, who has also appeared in BURN AFTER READING, "The Good Wife," "Nurse Jackie," and more will next be seen on the New York stage in March in Suzan-Lori Parks' "The Book of Grace."
In Louisa May Alcott: THE WOMAN BEHIND LITTLE WOMEN, Marvel brings Alcott's surprisingly complex story to vivid life. Louisa's life was no children's book: she worked as a servant, a seamstress, and a Civil War nurse before becoming a millionaire celebrity writing "moral pap for the young," as she called it. Under pen names and anonymously, she also wrote stories with enough drugs, sex and crime to prove the author was no "little" woman. When she died, Alcott took her secret identity as a pulp fiction writer with her, and kept it for nearly a half-century.
The author of Little Women is an almost universally recognized name. Her reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster, reflecting the conventional propriety of late 19th-century Concord, is firmly established. However, raised among reformers, Transcendentalists and skeptics, the intellectual protégé of Emerson and Hawthorne and Thoreau, Alcott was actually a free thinker with democratic ideals and progressive values about women - a worldly careerist of sorts. Most surprising is that she led, under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, a literary double life, undiscovered until the 1940s. As Barnard, Alcott penned scandalous, sensational works with characters running the gamut from murderers and revolutionaries to cross-dressers and opium addicts - a far cry from her familiar fatherly mentors, courageous mothers and appropriately impish children.
