Edward Graczyk Dies: ‘Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean’ Playwright Was 84
Edward Graczyk, best known for Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, the 1982 Broadway play and film adaptation both directed by Robert Altman, died in Sidney, Ohio, on February 11 following a lengthy illness. He was 84.
His death was announced Monday by his agent.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1941, Graczyk had written several children’s plays early in his career when, in the mid-1970s, he drove through Marfa, Texas, the small town where the 1956 film Giant, starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, had been shot. That experience, along with the widespread closings of old-fashioned five-and-dime stores, inspired Graczyk to pen the work that would be his legacy.
The play, he once said, “can only be described as the result of my own observations and frustrations with progress that ignores a past; the lack of personalization and pride and the recurring need of people to build
