Wilson Collison


Wilson Collison was a prolific author and playwright.

Early years

Wilson Collison was the son of John B. Collison, a clerk in the City Engineer's Office, and Mary E. Gardner. Wilson Collison abandoned plans to become a scientist when he found he preferred writing. Showing signs of early talent he was nine when a Columbus newspaper accepted one of his stories. His writing was largely self-developed, as he completed only one year of high school. He worked as a printer, a stenographer, an advertising writer, and as a clerk in the wholesale and retail drug business.

Actor

At 18 Collison became an actor with a repertory company that toured small towns in Michigan. He also was a vaudeville performer.

Playwright and novelist

Collison's fame as a playwright came in 1919, when Up in Mabel's Room became a Broadway hit. Collison was an $18-a-week clerk in a Columbus, Ohio drugstore when he turned out this first success, in collaboration with Otto Harbach, about the pursuit of an incriminating undergarment which a shy bridegroom in a single bold moment had presented to a young woman whom he had temporarily fancied. Collison also co-wrote two successful farces with Avery Hopwood: The Girl in the Limousine, about a man who is robbed and left in a woman's bedroom, and Getting Gertie's Garter, about a lawyer who doesn't understand the difference between a bracelet and a garter.
Collison's play Red Dust, which closed after eight performances in New York, became the 1932 Clark Gable film by the same name and the 1953 Clark Gable film Mogambo. The hit movie had been a flop on stage: "Red Dust, a turgid play," was "a repetitious melodrama... Another of those plays of the tropics, or anyway the near tropics, where passions are primitive and men wear their shirts open in the front," wrote the New York Times. His 1932 novel "The Red-Haired Alibi" was turned into a feature-length film of the same name by Tower Productions. Directed by Christy Cabanne, it was the first feature-length film to include Shirley Temple in the credits.
The Maisie series of motion pictures, with the first in 1939, was from Collison's novel Dark Dame. MGM cast Ann Sothern as Maisie Ravier, a brash American working woman. Sothern played the same role in a half-hour weekly radio series.
One of his works was adapted as 1933 film Sing, Sinner Sing

Works

Plays

Collison died at home of a heart attack. He had no funeral, at his request, and his remains were cremated.