Alice Arlen, screenwriter with journalistic pedigree, dies at 75

Alice Arlen, a screenwriter who collaborated with Nora Ephron on the 1983 Mike Nichols film “Silkwood,” the story of a lab worker killed in a suspicious car crash en route to meet a reporter to expose what she considered life-threatening dangers at a nuclear plant, died Monday at her home in New York.

The screenplay, which centered on Karen Silkwood, played by Meryl Streep, left open the question of whether Silkwood died accidentally or was murdered, though the film implied that she and others handling highly radioactive plutonium were being exposed to contamination at a nuclear fuel recycling plant in Oklahoma.

Fascinated by tales of injustice against ordinary people, Ms. Arlen was a rebel and a writer by nature, the scion of one of America’s most prominent journalism families.

After her success with “Silkwood,” Ms. Arlen wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle’s 1985 film “Alamo Bay,” about the battles of Texas fishermen and Vietnamese immigrants over shrimp and fish harvests in the Gulf of Mexico.



Besides her husband, Ms. Arlen is survived by her children, Alicia Adams, Patrick Hoge of Oakland and Robert Hoge; her stepdaughters Jennifer, Caroline, Elizabeth and Sally, all with the surname Arlen; her brother, Joseph Medill Patterson Albright; her step-siblings Adam Medill Albright and Blandina Albright Rojek; and 12 grandchildren.