Ira Levin

Novelist and playwright whose bestsellers included 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'The Stepford Wives'

Ira Marvin Levin, novelist and playwright: born New York 27 August 1929; married 1960 Gabrielle Aronsohn (three sons; marriage dissolved 1968), 1979 Phyllis Finkel (marriage dissolved 1981); died New York 12 November 2007.

Ira Levin was the king of the high-concept thriller. Although he produced more plays than he did novels (10 plays, seven novels) in a writing career spanning over 50 years, three novels were massive bestsellers that were made into highly successful movies – Rosemary's Baby (1967), The Stepford Wives (1972) and The Boys From Brazil (1976). And his début, A Kiss Before Dying, published in 1953 when he was only 23, remains a masterpiece of crime fiction.

But Ira Levin was in many ways more interested in the theatre. His most successful play, the comedy thriller Death Trap, ran for four years on Broadway. When Ira was growing up in the Bronx and Manhattan, his father hoped that he might follow him into the family toy business. Ira was more interested in being a magazine illustrator but by the age of 15 he had set his sights firmly on making a career as a writer. This caused friction with his father. He said later: "It was rough growing up. We [his father and he] had a lot of conflict and I think it surfaced in my works."

He attended the prestigious Horace Mann School in New York then spent two years at Drake University in Iowa before transferring to New York University to study philosophy and English. He graduated in 1950 and his father reluctantly agreed to subsidise him for two years to see if he could make a go of it as a writer.

Ira Levin had, in fact, already begun his writing career at college. In his senior year he won the $200 second prize in a CBS-sponsored screenplay competition. He sold the screenplay to NBC where it featured in an anthology suspense series, Lights Out, in 1951. He also wrote for the television shows Clocks and US Steel Hour.

His début novel, A Kiss Before Dying, came out in 1953, just as he was drafted into the Army Signal Corps. He was stationed in Queens, New York, where he wrote and produced training films. A Kiss Before Dying was a remarkably accomplished murder mystery for a 23-year-old to write. About a woman tracking the killer of her sister, it featured multiple points of view that allowed for an effective surprise twist. It won the Edgar Award for best first novel of the year and was an immediate bestseller. It was filmed starring Joanne Woodward and Robert Wagner in 1956. (And again, unsuccessfully, in 1991.)

By the time of the film's release Levin had turned his attention successfully to Broadway. He adapted a now-forgotten book by Max Hyman – No Time For Sergeants – and the 1955 play ran for over 700 performances on Broadway, launching the career of the lead actor, Andy Griffith. In 1958 it was made into a film and, briefly, a television series.

He stayed with theatre for the next 10 years, although less successfully. Interlock (1958), starring Maximilian Schell, ran for four performances. Critic's Choice (1960), starring Henry Fonda, fared better, running for three months. General Seeger, produced and directed by George C. Scott, lasted only two performances. A musical, Drat! That Cat!, that he spent 10 years on, ran for only one week in 1966 (although a song he had written for it later became a hit for Barbra Streisand).

Levin's first wife, Gabrielle, was pregnant with one of their three children when he conceived the idea for his second novel, Rosemary's Baby, about a young woman who is duped into bearing the child of Satan. Published in 1967, 14 years after his début novel, it had already sold 2.3 million copies by the time the movie directed by Roman Polanski came out the following year. This ultimate piece of paranoid fiction has since sold five million copies.

He followed this with another play, Doctor Cook's Garden (1968), later made into a TV film starring Bing Crosby. His third novel, This Perfect Day (1970), was a piece of future fiction which got mixed reviews but has since become something of a cult.

Two years later Levin came up with another high-concept novel, The Stepford Wives (1972), in which husbands in a Connecticut town replace their wives with obedient robots. It was inspired by a section on robots in Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock and was written soon after Levin's divorce from Gabrielle. "I was feeling pretty bitter about the relationship between the sexes," he said.

The Stepford Wives, too, was snapped up by Hollywood, though the film (directed by Brit Bryan Forbes and starring his wife Nanette Newman with Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss) was for many fans of the book a disappointment. A pointless remake was filmed, starring Nicole Kidman, in 2004. Levin apparently liked the fact that "Stepford wife" became shorthand for anything compliant or mindless.

In 1974 Levin was back in the theatre with Veronica's Room. Two years later, after Levin had read a newspaper article on cloning which suggested Mozart and Hitler might be good candidates, he published The Boys From Brazil. In this thriller the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele tries to clone Adolf Hitler to bring back the Third Reich. The 1978 film version starred Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier.

In the same year, Levin moved back to theatre with his Broadway hit Deathtrap. (It was filmed in 1982 starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve.) He won a second Edgar for it in 1980. The tale of an ageing dramatist who plots to kill a young rival and steal his new play, Deathtrap ran on Broadway for 1,793 performances, from 1978 to 1982. Break A Leg (1981) starring Julie Harris – which only ran for one night – and Cantorial (1982) followed.

In the Seventies and Eighties there were a number of television sequels to the films of Levin's books: Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby (1976), Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980), The Stepford Children (1987) and The Stepford Husbands (1988).

His next original piece of fiction appeared in 1991. Levin had long lived in Manhattan and Sliver was set in a high-tech Manhattan apartment and involved another paranoid woman under constant surveillance. It was made into a mediocre Sharon Stone movie by the director Philip Noyce.

Levin's final novel was Son of Rosemary (1997), an ill-advised sequel to Rosemary's Baby which got poor reviews. Levin had never been a literary stylist but his books were page-turners with great plots. A Newsweek critic was unduly harsh when he compared Levin's fiction to a bag of popcorn: "Utterly without nutritive value and probably fattening, yet there's no way to stop once you've started." Stephen King was more accurate when he said: "Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels: he makes what the rest of us do look like cheap watches in drug stores."

Although he wrote only seven novels in some 50 years, the books sold in their tens of millions. He explained his small output once by saying: "I have never been able to work unless I'm really excited about what I'm doing, unless it demands to be written."

Ira Levin was a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and won the Bram Stoker Award for a lifetime's achievement from the US Horror Writers Association. He will probably be best remembered for Rosemary's Baby, about which he commented: "I feel guilty that Rosemary's Baby led to The Exorcist, The Omen, etc. A whole generation has more belief in Satan. I don't believe in Satan. Of course, I didn't send back any of the royalty cheques."

Peter Guttridge