'Heidi Chronicles' Playwright Wendy Wasserstein

Born Oct. 18, 1950, in Brooklyn, Ms. Wasserstein was the youngest of four children of Lola and Morris Wasserstein, Jewish immigrants from central Europe who had come to the United States as children in the 1920s. Her father was a prosperous textile manufacturer, her mother, a housewife and perennial dance student.

In the early 1960s, she moved with her family from Brooklyn to Manhattan's affluent Upper East Side, where she grew up in what she described as "nice middle-class surroundings." After graduating from an exclusive East Side prep school for girls, she attended Mount Holyoke College, where she majored in intellectual history and considered law school and medical school.

The turning point came when a friend suggested that she take a summer playwriting course at nearby Smith College. That experience boosted her confidence, and she became involved in campus theatrical productions at Amherst College, where she spent her junior year.

After graduating from Mount Holyoke in 1971, she enrolled at City College of New York to study creative writing with Israel Horvitz and Joseph Heller. Her play "Any Woman Can't" was produced off-Broadway in 1973.

Receiving her master's degree from City College later that year, she enrolled at Yale University's School of Drama, where classmates included Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Glenn Close and Jill Eikenberry. She received her master's of fine arts degree from Yale in 1976.

She still had doubts about her talent. Her friend Bishop remembered her as "a warm, giggly mass of curls -- a shy, awkward, self-deprecating woman who was quite insecure about her own work and extremely supportive of the work of others."

"What's great about Wendy now," Bishop told The Post in 1995, "is that she has kept all her good qualities and eliminated the bad."

Her big break came when Playwrights Horizons in New York produced "Uncommon Women and Others" in 1977. She was still working as a gofer for the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. "We got 2,000 scripts a year," she told The Post. "My job was to schlepp the scripts to readers all over the city. Needless to say, I got well-versed in who was writing what in America, and I began to realize that I wasn't seeing any plays that reflected the women I knew."

Determined to create strong female characters, she wrote "Isn't It Romantic" (1983), about a young TV writer whose parents keep insisting that she find a nice Jewish doctor to marry. The play helped her win a grant to study in London, where she wrote another play about women she knew, "The Heidi Chronicles."

Ms. Wasserstein also wrote for television and film. Her best-known screenplay is the 1998 film version of Stephen McCauley's novel "The Object of My Affection," about a pregnant woman and a gay man who meet and move in together.

She also wrote a children's book and two collections of personal essays, "Bachelor Girls" (1990) and "Shiksa Goddess: Or, How I Spent My Forties" (2001).

At age 48, Ms. Wasserstein had a daughter. She never revealed the identity of the child's father.

Survivors include her daughter, Lucy Jane Wasserstein, her mother, Lola Wasserstein, and a brother, all of New York City; and a sister.