Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a 2018 American biographical film directed by Marielle Hellerand with a screenplay by Nicole Holofcenerand Jeff Whitty, based on the confessional memoir of the same name by Lee Israel. Melissa McCarthy stars as Israel, and the story follows her attempts to revitalize her failing writing career by forging letters from deceased authors and playwrights.[4] The film also features Richard E. Grant, Dolly Wells, Jane Curtin, Anna Deavere Smith, Stephen Spinella, and Ben Falcone in supporting roles. Israel took the title from an apologetic line in a letter in which she posed as Dorothy Parker
In 1991, following the critical and commercial failure of her biography of Estée Lauder, author Lee Israel struggles with financial troubles, writer’s block, and alcoholism. With her agent unable to secure her an advance for a new book, Israel sells her possessions to cover expenses, selling a personal letter she received from Katharine Hepburn to a book dealer named Anna. Meanwhile, she forms a friendship with an old acquaintance, Jack Hock.
While researching a potential Fanny Bricebiography, Israel discovers two letters written by Brice, one of which she takes and shows Anna. Anna gives a low offer due to the bland content. Israel returns home and adds a postscript to the second letter before bringing it back to Anna, who takes the letter for $350. Israel then starts forging and selling letters by deceased celebrities, incorporating intimate details to command high prices. Anna, a fan of Israel’s writing, tries to initiate a romantic relationship, but the socially phobic Israel rebuffs her.
When one of Israel’s letters raises suspicion for its unguarded discussion of Noël Coward‘s sexuality, her buyers start blacklisting her. Unable to sell the forgeries, she has Jack sell the letters on her behalf. She also starts stealing authentic letters from libraries and archives to sell, replacing them with forged duplicates. While Israel is out of town committing one such theft, her cat dies under Jack’s care. She ends their friendship but continues their partnership out of necessity.
The FBI arrests Jack while he is attempting a sale. He cooperates with them, resulting in Israel being served with a court summons. She retains a lawyer, who advises her to show contrition by getting a job, doing community service, and joining Alcoholics Anonymous. In court, Israel admits she enjoyed creating the forgeries and does not regret her actions, but realizes that her crimes were not worth it because they did not show her true self as a writer. The judge sentences Israel to five years’ probation and six months’ house arrest.
Sometime later, Israel reconciles with Jack, now dying of AIDS, and receives his permission to write a memoir about their escapades. While passing a bookstore, she sees a Dorothy Parker letter she forged on sale for $1,900. Disgusted, she writes the store owner a sarcastic note in Parker’s voice. Upon receiving Israel’s note and realizing that the letter in the storefront window is a fake, the owner removes it from the window, but changes his mind and decides to keep it on display.
Now a major motion picture starring Melissa McCarthy—Lee Israel’s hilarious and shocking memoir of the astonishing caper she carried on for almost two years when she forged and sold more than three hundred letters by such literary notables as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, and many others.
Before turning to her life of crime—running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI—Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines.
But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she’d received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats. Between 1990 and 1991, she wrote more than three hundred letters in the voices of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Coward—and sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers.
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