Patricia Broderick

Patricia Biow Broderick (February 23, 1925 – November 18, 2003) was an American playwright and painter. She was the wife of actor James Broderick and the mother of actor Matthew Broderick.

Life and career

Broderick was born Patricia Biow in New York City, the daughter of Sophie (née Taub) (1895–1943) and Milton H. Biow (1892–1976), president of an advertising firm. Her family were Jewish immigrants from Germany and Poland. When she was eighteen, her mother died at the age of 48 and her father died 33 years later. In Mexico, Broderick studied painting with Rufino Tamayo who had been her art teacher at the Dalton School in Manhattan. She began writing plays in the 1940s and several of them were performed in New York and London. Her 1996 film, Infinity, was based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

Her paintings were displayed in several galleries in New York and across the country. Broderick's partner of her last six years was the painter John Wesley. Broderick died of cancer on November 18, 2003, at her home in Greenwich Village, aged 78.