The Glass Menagerie” opens on Broadway.

Tom Williams graduated college and moved about the country, making a living writing under his adopted name Tennessee Wiliams. It wasn’t a very good living, but he did manage to receive a grant for $1,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation, which brought him to a contract with MGM. At the request of the studio, Williams produced The Glass Menagerie, based on a previous short story he wrote, Portrait of a Girl in Glass, and one of his most famous works , as a screenplay.

On this day, March 30, in 1945, after a brief run in Chicago The Glass Menagerie the play opened in the Playhouse Theatre in Broadway.

MGM had initially passed on Williams’ script for the movie, prompting him to rewrite it as a play. Williams had the last laugh, however, as Warner Brothers picked up the rights The Glass Menagerie and released it on the silver screen, with Kirk Douglas and Jane Wyman in the lead roles, in September 1950.