"I was intrigued by this preposterous friendship. "I was immediately attracted by the language of the play," he said during a telephone interview from his home on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The play's director, Kent Paul, was unfamiliar with the book and movie but knew he wanted to direct the play after the Irish Repertory Theatre's producing director, Ciaran O'Reilly, gave him the script for consideration. The book was the basis of a 1983 TV movie, " The Scarlet and the Black," starring Gregory Peck as O'Flaherty, Christopher Plummer as Kappler and Sir John Gielgud as Pope Pius XII. Herbert Kappler was the infamous head of the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied Rome. Hugh O'Flaherty was an Irish priest who saved more than 6,500 Jews and escaped Allied POWs in Rome by sheltering them and arranging for their escape, using his role as notary of the Holy Office and the cover of Vatican neutrality. Gallagher's 1967 book Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican will know these two historical figures.
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