Andre's Mother is a 1990 American

Cinema of the United States

The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...

 drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 directed by Deborah Reinisch. The screenplay by Terrence McNally

Terrence McNally

Terrence McNally is an American playwright who has received four Tony Awards, an Emmy, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Hull-Warriner Award, and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a member of the Council of the...

 is an expansion of an eight-minute play written for an anthology called Urban Blight that was produced by the Manhattan Theater Club in 1988.

The film was produced by WGBH Boston

WGBH-TV

WGBH-TV, channel 2, is a non-commercial educational public television station located in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. WGBH-TV is a member station of the Public Broadcasting Service , and produces more than two-thirds of PBS's national prime time television programming...

 and was broadcast on March 7, 1990 by PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

 stations nationwide as part of the American Playhouse

American Playhouse

American Playhouse is an anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.It premiered on January 12, 1982 with The Shady Hill Kidnapping, written and narrated by John Cheever and directed by Paul Bogart...

series. It was released on Region 1 DVD on April 25, 2006.

Plot

Set at the Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

 memorial service for Andre Gerard, who died of AIDS

AIDS

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...

 and was buried in Dallas several weeks earlier, the story focuses on his mother Katherine's inability to come to terms with his death or share her grief with Cal, the young man's lover. Her rage is directed not only at the man she never accepted and her own mother, who was less judgmental of her grandson's life, but at Andre himself as well.

Main castmembers

• Sada Thompson
  Sada Thompson
  Sada Carolyn Thompson was an American stage, film, and television actress.-Life and career:Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1927 to Hugh Woodruff Thompson and his wife Corlyss , and raised in New Jersey, Thompson earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, after...
  
   ..... Katherine Gerard
• Richard Thomas
  Richard Thomas (actor)
  Richard Earl Thomas is an American actor, best known for his role as budding author John-Boy Walton in the CBS drama The Waltons.- Early life :Thomas was born Richard Earl Thomas in New York,...
  
   ..... Cal
• Sylvia Sidney
  Sylvia Sidney
  Sylvia Sidney was an American actress who rose to prominence in the 1930s appearing in numerous crime dramas.-Early life:...
  
   ..... Katherine's mother

Critical reception

John O'Connor of the New York Times called it one of those "programs that vividly illustrate why public television can be indispensable ... Andre's Mother has been given a superb cast and an exquisite production ... Even in this sensitive exercise, obviously, the subject of AIDS is handled with some trepidation. Andre cannot be just an average guy; he has to be a paragon ... But the AIDS epidemic is claiming ordinary and exceptionally gifted citizens alike. Perhaps they can all merit television's unselfconscious compassion some day. Meanwhile, bolstered powerfully by the performances of Miss Thompson and Mr. Thomas, Andre's Way makes encouraging headway in the right direction."

Awards

McNally won the Emmy Award

Primetime Emmy Award

The Primetime Emmy Awards are awards presented by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in recognition of excellence in American primetime television programming...

 for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special, and the National Board of Review

National Board of Review of Motion Pictures

The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures was founded in 1909 in New York City, just 13 years after the birth of cinema, to protest New York City Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr.'s revocation of moving-picture exhibition licenses on Christmas Eve 1908. The mayor believed that the new medium...

named it Outstanding Television Movie of the Year.