Biography

Marielle Heller is a writer, director and actor. She was selected as a 2012 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow and 2012 Sundance Directing Fellow, and was honored with the Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship, and The Maryland Film Festival Fellowship. Her writing credits include pilots for ABC and 20th Century Fox, and multiple screenplays and theatrical plays. She has performed at theaters all over the world, from New York to the West End.

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Marielle Stiles Heller (born October 1, 1979) is an American writer, director, and actor. She is the writer and director of the feature film The Diary of a Teenage Girl and the director of Can You Ever Forgive Me?.

Marielle Heller was born in Marin, California to Steve Heller, a chiropractor, and his wife Annie, an artist and art teacher. She grew up in nearby Alameda along with her younger brother and sister, Nate and Emily. Heller started off as an actor, calling acting her "first love." As a child, she was part of the Alameda Children's Musical Theater, where she participated in as many as four plays a year, including the roles of Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh, Templeton the rat in Charlotte's Web, and Polly in The Magician's Nephew. With time, she graduated to community theater, as well as productions at Saint Joseph Notre Dame, where she attended high school. She graduated in 1997. She studied theatre at UCLA and then at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Additionally, she was honored with a Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship and The Maryland Film Festival Fellowship.

After returning to the US, she worked as an actor at the Magic Theatre, the American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and the La Jolla Playhouse. She was in the world premiere of David Edgar's Continental Divide directed by Tony Taccone.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl was Heller's debut film, that she both wrote and directed. It is based on the 2002 graphic novel titled The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures by Phoebe Gloeckner, which she received as a Christmas present from her sister in 2006. The story's protagonist, Minnie, is a 15-year-old girl living in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1976 who begins an affair with her mother's 35-year-old boyfriend, Monroe. Heller was taken with Minnie's character, a young woman who is confident in her sexuality and, noting the lack of films that represent young women in such a way, she set to adapting the graphic novel to play. With Gloeckner's blessing, worked the script into a screenplay. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2015, and later received a limited release in August 2015. The film stars Bel Powley as Minnie. Heller was selected as a 2012 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow and 2012 Sundance Directing Fellow, where she had submitted the script for the Sundance writer and director workshop. She then proceeded to direct a teaser for the film using grant money from the writer's workshop. The film received critical acclaim at Sundance, and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. The film also won the Grand Prix of the Generation 14plus at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2015. In 2016, the film was named best first feature at the Independent Spirit Awards.

Heller's writing credits include pilots for ABC and 20th Century Fox, and multiple screenplays and theatrical plays, including a pilot for ABC's The Big Apple and a movie for Disney, titled Renegade X.

Heller next directed Can You Ever Forgive Me about literary forger and writer Lee Israel, based on the author's memoir. She teamed up again with Archer Gray, who she first worked with on Diary. With a limited budget, filming a movie set in the 1990s was a challenge. She cast Melissa McCarthy in the title role based on the actress's performance in the 2014 film St. Vincent. They shot on location in bookstores where Israel had sold her forgeries, including the Argosy Bookstore and Westsider Rare & Used Books. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2018. It was released on October 19, 2018 by Fox Searchlight.

In January 2018, it was announced that Heller would direct You Are My Friend, a film that chronicles an interview Tom Junod conducted with child entertainer Fred Rogers for Esquire magazine, and how the encounter impacted the journalist's life. The screenplay was written by Emmy-nominated producers Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster. Tom Hanks, who portrays Mr. Rogers, agreed to join the project once Heller signed on as director, as they had met previously through Hank's son, Colin. It is being filmed in Pittsburgh.

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