Who Wrote Arsenic and Old Lace?
In 1939, playwright Joseph Kesselring wrote Arsenic and Old Lace, featuring the delightful, ditsy sisters Abby and Martha Brewster. The spinster sisters ran a boarding house for “lonely, elderly men,” and they helped these men to the “great beyond” by poisoning them with wine laced with arsenic and cyanide.
Source: Moviestillsdb.com/ Copyright: Warner Bros.
Indeed, the dark comedy was funny, but the person who inspired Kesselring was anything but comedic. The murderous, little old ladies plot in the loveable play that was later turned into a movie was loosely based on Amy Archer-Gilligan, who took in boarders, promising lifetime care only to poison them.