Sarah Marshall Kernochan (; born December 30, 1947) is an American documentarian, film director, screenwriter and novelist. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including two Academy Awards (Documentary Feature for Marjoe in 1973 and Documentary Short Subject for Thoth in 2002) Early life Kernochan was born in New York City, the daughter of Adelaide (Chatfield-Taylor), a UNESCO consultant, and John Marshall Kernochan, a Columbia Law School professor. Her maternal grandfather was Wayne Chatfield-Taylor, Under Secretary of Commerce and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her maternal great-grandparents included writers Hobart Chatfield-Taylor and Anna De Koven. Her great-great-grand father was Illinois Senator and XIT Ranch owner Charles B. Farwell. Her paternal grandfather was composer Marshall Kernochan. She graduated from Rosemary Hall (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in 1965, where Kernochan was a classmate of Glenn Close, and attended Sarah Lawrence College in 1966. Career After Sarah Lawrence, she worked as a ghostwriter for The Village Voice for about a year. After quitting that job, she became interested in documentary film-making and soon gained national prominence in the United States as co-director and co-producer with Howard Smith of the 1972 film Marjoe (about evangelist Marjoe Gortner), which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Kernochan's first screen credit as a screenwriter came with the 1986 film 9½ Weeks. She followed that film with the script for Dancers (1987), starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and directed by Herbert Ross, which chronicled the backstage drama of a ballet company (played by American Ballet Theatre dancers) and their director during the staging of the ballet Giselle. By the time she was brought in to work on the 1993 film Sommersby, she had become known for a particular style of writing in Hollywood. She commented in an interview with Salon.com: I think people know that there's no point in calling me in if you want the other kind of women characters: a featureless "help me" character, or the saint, the whore — you know, any of the archetypes. I don't think all women are powerful, intelligent, any of those things. I just require that female characters be very real, that they have all the dimensions that the male characters do. Since then, she has been primarily a screenwriter for such films as Dancers (1987); Impromptu (1991), the debut film directed by her husband James Lapine with a script she characterized as "maybe the