Who is Alan Ball, the star screenwriter behind American Beauty and True Blood?

By Alexis Thibault.

Published on 6 September 2020. Updated on 20 July 2026.

The stage, film set, then the Oscars 

After taking theatre classes in Georgia, then in Florida, Alan Ball moved to New York at the start of the 1990s. There he wrote several plays, including Five Women Wearing the Same Dress (1993) and Made for a Woman (1994). It wasn’t long before Hollywood called him across the continent, much to his delight. He started working as a TV screenwriter with a handful of unpretentious shows, like Cybill, which followed the adventures of a failed actress, or the sitcom Oh Grow Up.

1992 marked a turning point for the American screenwriter and director. That year, Amy Fisher, known as the “Long Island Lolita”, fatally injured the wife of her lover, Joey Buttafuoco. She was only 17. Alan Ball drew on the media circus surrounding the trial to write the script for American Beauty (1999). The result is a feature blending innocence and predatory charm. Behind the façade of the rich suburban house of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) and his wife Carolyn (Annette Benning), unravels a tragic comedy, inevitably leading to death… Alan Ball’s first venture into film was a huge success. Directed by Sam Mendes, American Beauty received the Oscar and Golden Globe for best screenplay in 2000. A brilliant start.

From Six Feet Under to True Blood

The American director’s success was not limited to cinema only. In 2001, he started writing Six Feet Under, an HBO series that would eventually be unanimously acclaimed by the critics. That project earned him two Golden Globes and six Emmy Awards. Set in Los Angeles, “the world capital of the denial of death”, according to Alan Ball himself, the Fisher family inherits the undertakers established by the father, who died in an accident. In this series, black humour is key, the star screenwriter’s ingenuity led to the writing of ever more unlikely sequences.

A strange, not very reassuring thing is the scriptwriter’s fascination with death. Any desire to joke about it, however, fades when one knows where it stems from. “I was 13 years old when my sister and I were in a car accident. It was her 22nd birthday and she died. She died in front of me. She died on me. Death stuck its big face in mine and my life changed forever. That’s why death seems like a recurrent theme in my work,” Alan Ball explained.  

With the series True Blood, Alan Ball changed register and dived into Charlaine Harris’s bestselling saga, Southern Vampire Mysteries. Here, vampires live among humans, drinking synthetic blood as a friendly alternative to mass killing. Openly gay, Alan Ball is very active in the LGBT community. The latter uses his powerful voice to feature more queer characters in his work. As president of the production society Your Face Goes Here Entertainment, he produced True Blood (2008-2014) and Banshee (2013-2015), broadcast on Cinemax.

A new direction with the series Here and Now

Alan Ball often shared that he has no emotional connection with his writing. According to him, beauty exists in the strangest of places. The United States of America thus serves as a bottomless well of inspiration for him. In 2018, the screenwriter unveiled the HBO drama series Here and Now, where black humour runs rife. The show follows the ups and downs of a multi-racial family composed of a philosophy teacher, his lawyer wife and their three adopted children from Somalia, Vietnam and Columbia.