Playwright Christopher Fry, a Christian humanist who helped T.S. Eliot revive verse drama in the 1940s and who was one of the people credited with helping to write the script for “Ben Hur,” has died at the age of 97, his son said.

Fry died June 30 in the hospital in Chichester, southern England, Tam Fry said. The cause of death was not announced.

A master of whimsical comic verse, Fry’s best-known plays, “The Lady’s Not for Burning” (1948) and “Venus Observed” (1949), have a sense of benign providence and hope for humanity that struck a chord in a world still coming to terms with news of the Holocaust and the use of the atom bomb.

Born in Bristol, southwest England, Fry trained as a teacher and taught for a number of years before quitting to found the Tunbridge Wells Repertory Players in 1932, directing the English premier of George Bernard Shaw’s “Village Wooing.”

He also wrote music and lyrics and began to take church commissions.

In the late 1950s, Fry turned to film scripts, rewriting William Wyler’s film of “Ben Hur” and scripting “Barabbas” for Dino De Laurentis.

He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry in 1962.

Associated Press