Ferenc Molnár.

Neumann Ferenc was born to Mór Neumann in Budapest, then part of Austria-Hungary, on 12 January 1878. He later adopted the Hungarian name Molnár Ferenc. He attended the University of Geneva for higher education.

His 1909 play Liliom brought him international fame. It premiered in Budapest and later enjoyed success in the United States. Composer Giacomo Puccini asked to turn the play into an opera, but Molnár refused. He feared the work would be remembered more as Puccini’s than his own. After seeing Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Oklahoma!, he agreed to their musical adaptation. It became the 1945 hit Carousel. During World War I, he served as a war correspondent on German and Austrian fronts. He also acted in the 1926 film Camille: the Fate of a Coquette and contributed to screenplays for Tales of Manhattan 1942 and I’ll Be Yours 1947.

He married three women: Margit Vészi, actress Sári Fedák, and actress Lili Darvas. He had one child, a daughter named Márta Sárközy. In his later years, he lived in the United States as a refugee from the Nazis, settling in New York City where he died in 1952.

Liliom remains Molnár’s most enduring work. It became the basis for the musical Carousel and has seen revivals of the original play in the United States. The 2004 release of the 1934 film version revived interest. Molnár received the Order of Franz Joseph. Audiences remember him as a master of Hungarian theatre whose work crossed cultural boundaries through adaptation.