Michael Arlen

About the Michael Arlen

Michael Arlenwas an essayist, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and scriptwriter. He had his greatest successes in the 1920s while living and writing in England, publishing the best-selling novel The Green Hat in 1924. Arlen is most famous for his satirical romances set in English smart society, but he also wrote gothic horror and psychological thrillers, for instance “The Gentleman from America”, which was filmed in 1948 as The Fatal Night, and again in 1956 as a television episode for Alfred Hitchcock’s TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Near the end of his life, Arlen mainly occupied himself with political writing. Arlen’s vivid but colloquial style “with unusual inversions and inflections with a heightened exotic pitch” came to be known as ‘Arlenesque’.

Very much a 1920s society figure resembling the characters he portrayed in his novels, and a man who might be referred to as a dandy, Arlen invariably impressed everyone with his immaculate manners. He was always impeccably dressed and groomed, and was seen driving around London in a fashionable yellow Rolls-Royce and engaging in various luxurious activities. However, he was well aware of the latent suspicion of foreigners, mixed with the envy with which his success was viewed by some.

His works became an inspiration for famous Hollywood movies such as A Woman of Affairs (1928), starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert; The Golden Arrow (1936), starring Bette Davis; and he was screenwriter of The Heavenly Body (1944), based on a story by Jacques Thery, starring William Powell and Hedy Lamarr.