Gretchen Dyer was known for her success in independent film circles, but her life stories could fill the screens of a multiplex cinema.
She was successful in writing for stage and screen, had an impressive college resume, defied medical odds and established a legacy as a passionate feminist.
Ms. Dyer, 50, died June 11 at UT Southwestern University Hospital-St. Paul of complications of congenital heart disease.
A memorial was held Tuesday at the First Unitarian Church in Dallas. Friends and admirers will honor her at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Angelika at Mockingbird Station with a screening of her best-known work, Late Bloomers. The original 33 mm film will be shown, and some of the actors are expected to attend.
Ms. Dyer lifted the independent film culture in North Texas, both by making a Sundance festival-quality feature with Late Bloomers and helping other screenwriters, said Mark Birnbaum, another Dallas filmmaker.
One of her big contributions was organizing a series of potlatches, where writers, actors and filmmakers gathered for table reads.
"It was often the first time writers had heard their works read out loud in front of an audience by good actors," Mr. Birnbaum said. "The atmosphere those nights was electric. We were hearing some good work. You could feel the momentum of the independent film movement on those evenings."
Victoria Loe Hicks, a former Dallas Morning News employee who was one of Ms. Dyer's co-authors on the recently premiered play One in 3 , added: "Gretchen was the mother ship, the center of gravity for a whole bunch of creative, impassioned, progressive people all over North Texas.
"She was the North Star we could always turn to for our artistic, emotional and moral bearings."
Ms. Dyer was born in Austin and lived in the Dallas area until she moved with her family to The Hague, Netherlands, where her father practiced international law.
She received a bachelor's degree in French literature from Boston University, where she was Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude. She continued her studies on a scholarship at the Sorbonne in Paris.
In 1986, she was working as a secretary in Boston and writing fiction in her spare time when her sister sent her a screenplay to review. Julia Dyer, a film student at the University of Texas at Austin, had been selected to write and produce a film.
"I sent it to her to see if she had any comments about it," Julia Dyer said. "She called back and said, 'It's OK, but I think I can do better.' "
Gretchen Dyer wrote a screenplay using similar characters and story - but with a different approach.
"It was a lot better than mine, so we decided to make her script," Julia said.
The sisters collaborated in Boston and Austin to make Julia's student film.
"From that experience, we decided, when I graduated, that we really wanted to team up and work - writer and director," Julia Dyer said.
The sisters came to Dallas, partly for the city's energy for filmmaking and partly for family and medical reasons.
A routine physical before she studied in France revealed that Gretchen had a heart defect, which was repaired with surgery. Years later, when she was in her late 20s, she was told she would die within one to five years without a heart-lung transplant.
Ms. Dyer's real-life drama involved many subplots. There was a project to raise money for the procedure by making a film on organ transplants. But her condition did not advance as rapidly as first feared. She found ways to cope with her condition and focus on screenwriting.
In February 1994, Ms. Dyer awoke in the night with a story idea that, two years later, would be selected for showing at the Sundance Film Festival.
"We were shooting the movie by Thanksgiving of that year," Julia Dyer said.
Late Bloomers is an offbeat romantic comedy about middle-aged women - a teacher and a school secretary - who fall in love. Making the film was a family affair, with brother Stephen Dyer joining the project as a producer. Mr. Dyer is now a producer in Victor, Idaho.
"That's what's funny about it, they are not lesbians," Julia Dyer said. "But they fall in love, and they begin a relationship that defies categorization."
After the Sundance festival, Late Bloomers appeared in theaters in Dallas, New York and Los Angeles, as well as film festivals around the world.
The sisters continued to work together, making educational and industrial films, while developing feature-film projects.
In 2000, Gretchen Dyer started teaching women's studies at the University of North Texas.
"It turned out she had a great gift for it," her sister said. "She connected with a lot of young women."
Teaching the course solidified Ms. Dyer's feelings, intellectual philosophy and ideas about action in the world, Julia Dyer said.
Ms. Dyer's health began to fail about five years ago. When she was no longer able to teach, she founded the Texas Equal Access Fund, to help low-income and disadvantaged women meet the expense of abortion. Ms. Dyer's last produced work, One in 3, is a play about abortion.
In addition to her sister and brother, Ms. Dyer is survived by her husband, Steve Leary of Dallas; a stepdaughter, Emily Leary of Yukon, Okla.; her father, Adair Dyer of Austin; three stepsisters, Carol Godso of Houston and Amanda McDonough and Donnella Railsback, both of Boston.
Memorials may be made to the Texas Equal Access Fund or Save the Children.
