Jean Rouverol Dead at 100

Jean Rouverol wrote for daytime soap operas Bright Promise, Guiding Light,
As the World Turns and Search for Tomorrow during her career.

Jean Rouverol, an actress and former soap opera writer blacklisted in Hollywood during the 1950s, died Friday, March 24 in a nursing home in Wingdale, New York. She was 100.

Rouverol and her husband, screenwriter Hugo Butler, fled to Mexico during the 1950s following a subpoena to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The couple had joined the American Communist Party during the 1940s.

While living in exile with their four children, the couple collaborated on screenplays using pseudonyms and fronts that were then sold to Hollywood studios. Films they wrote together included the 1956 Joan Crawford drama Autumn Leaves, credited to colleague Jack Jevne, and the 1963 film, Face in the Rain, directed by Irvin Kershner. While in Mexico the couple had two more children.

They returned to the U.S. in 1964. Following Butler’s death in 1968, Rouverol wrote for television.