playwright, actor, and director whose dramas of the 1920s reflect the foibles of the American middle class with a telling accuracy.

Kelly followed his elder brother Walter into vaudeville as an actor, writing his first sketches himself. His first success on Broadway was The Torchbearers (performed 1922), a satire on the social and aesthetic pretensions of the Little Theatre movement then flourishing in the United States. His next play, The Show-Off (1924), became an American comedy classic, made three times as a film (1926, 1934, 1946) and often revived on the stage. In Craig's Wife (1925), Kelly shifted his vision to the upper middle class and abandoned comedy to write a savage drama of a woman who sacrifices her husband to her possessions, ultimately losing both. Kelly wrote several other plays, but none was a popular success. He wrote film scripts, among them those for the motion-picture versions of his plays, including Craig's Wife (1936), remade as Harriet Craig (1950).