film
The Road of Ambition (1920) Elaine Sterne was born in
Manhattan, New York City, the daughter of Marie Louise Henriques and Theodore Sterne, an importer of tobacco. Sterne was educated at
Columbia University. In 1920, she married attorney George Dart Carrington, whom she met in grade school. They lived in
Brooklyn Heights with children, Patricia and Robert. George died in 1945. She began writing films in 1913, and her scenario for
The Sins of the Mothers (1914) won first prize in a contest sponsored by
The New York Evening Sun and
Vitagraph Studios. By 1930 she had 50 screenwriting credits — including one for
Alibi, the 1929 adaptation of her 1927 Broadway play,
Nightstick, which she wrote with
J. C. Nugent,
Elliott Nugent and
John Wray. She also wrote several one-act vaudeville plays including
A Good Provider (1928),
The Red Hat,
Five Minutes from the Station, and
Fear. By the time she was in her 20s her fiction appeared in popular magazines including ''
Collier's, Good Housekeeping, Harper's Magazine, Pictorial Review, Redbook, The Saturday Evening Post and Woman's Home Companion. She also wrote novels, including The Road to Ambition
(1917) and The Gypsy Star
(1936), and she collected some of her short fiction in the 1939 book, All Things Considered''. Carrington's writing career was transformed in 1932, when a friend persuaded her to approach the
National Broadcasting Company about trying a dramatic serial on radio. Starring
Burgess Meredith, the 15-minute drama
Red Adams ran three days a week (October 2, 1932 – January 22, 1933). When it found
a new sponsor it was renamed
Red Davis (October 2, 1933 – May 24, 1935). "It was put on five days a week and became an enormous hit with housewives whose attentions could be diverted from the tedium of housekeeping," wrote
The New York Times in 1958. "The program changed sponsors again — this time to
a soap company — and it became the famous ''
Pepper Young's Family'', for which Mrs. Carrington at her death was still writing five fifteen-minute programs a week." Carrington created a second serial drama,
When a Girl Marries (1939–1957), and a third,
Rosemary (1944–1955) — requiring her to produce about 38,000 words a week. In 1946 she created
The Carrington Playhouse, a radio show that produced original plays that won its weekly contest. She also wrote patriotic scripts for the U.S. government during
World War II, and after the war wrote dramas for
Robert Montgomery Presents and other television programs. Carrington's full-length plays include
Remember Me? (1953),
Maggie, Pack Your Bags (1954), and
The Empress, a 1955 comedy that was presented in
Westport, Connecticut, with
Geraldine Page. ==Death ==