Frederica Sagor Maas

She gave up plans to be a doctor and studied journalism at Columbia University in New York City. She worked a summer as a copy girl for the "New York Globe" newspaper. She started in the film industry when she answered a want-ad for an assistant to the story editor at the Universal Pictures branch in New York City. She soon dropped out of college and scouted Broadway for film ideas. She moved to Hollywood in 1924, and although she was encouraged to be an actress, she decided against it and became a screenwriter, working for such studios as Universal, MGM, Paramount and Fox.

Frederica Sagor Maas was born in America, the youngest daughter of Russian immigrants. Feeling no great desire to complete her course in journalism at Columbia University, New York, she found film an exciting new artistic medium, and was hired by Universal Studios as a story editor, and later MGM as a fully fledged screenwriter. Thus began a bumpy life in the film industry. Maas went from rubbing shoulders with stars such as Clara Bow, Norma Shearer, and Joan Crawford and being at the top of her game with hits like The Plastic Age (1925) to watching several ideas and stories being robbed outright by unscrupulous insiders, to watching dear friends lose their careers in the McCarthy era, and eventually leaving the motion picture industry in the 1950s after a series of crushing disappointments.

She married fellow writer and producer Ernest Maas in 1927, and honoured his commitments to the industry long after she realised it would take from them far more than they would take from it.

At the time of her death, she was the 44th oldest person in the world according to the Gerontology Research Group.

The couple had no children and no immediate survivors. They were married for almost 60 years until her husband's death in 1986 at 94 years old.

She published her memoirs, "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim," in 1999 at 99 years old.

She was one of four daughters born in a cold-water railroad flat at 101st Street near Madison Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia.