“The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn’t pinpoint,” Tennessee Williams said in a 1981 interview in The Paris Review. “A play just seems to materialize, like an apparition it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It’s very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar…. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she’d been stood up by the man she planned to marry…. I called [the play] at the time, ‘Blanche’s Chair in the Moon,’ which is a very bad title. But it was from that image, you know, of a woman sitting by a window that Streetcar came to me.”

A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Kazan’s 1951 film version featured most of the original Broadway cast, with Vivien Leigh (who had played Blanche in the European premiere, directed by Laurence Olivier) replacing Jessica Tandy.