After graduating with honors in sociology from the University of Iowa, Marian Rees moved to Los Angeles in 1952, where she began her television career as a receptionist-typist at NBC. By 1955, she had joined the Norman Lear-Bud Yorkin company, Tandem Productions, and in 1958, she served as an associate producer of the much-honored An Evening with Fred Astaire. She continued to advance in the organization, and by the early 1970s, she served as associate producer of the pilots of All in the Family and Sanford and Son. In 1972, however, she was told by Tandem that she would be happier elsewhere, and was given two weeks’ notice. It was a stunning blow, but as she told an interviewer in 1986, she used the firing to grow.

Rees assumed a new position at the independent production company Tomorrow Entertainment, where she broadened her knowledge of development, preproduction, and postproduction. At Tomorrow, Rees was associated with a variety of quality productions, including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. She then spent two years as vice president of the NRW Company, where she was the executive producer of The Marva Collins Story, a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation starring Cicely Tyson. In 1982, Rees formed her own company, Marian Rees Associates. Anne Hopkins joined the company as a partner and has continued to work with Rees ever since.

In order to fund her first independent productions, Rees initially mortgaged her home and car, facing demands for financial qualification far more extensive than would have been required for a man. She pressed for months to gain network approval for her first production, Miss All-American Beauty, but resistance continued, and she finally learned that the male executive she had to convince simply did not want to trust a woman. Finally, with funds running extremely low, approval for the project came from CBS. Rees completed the production under budget, and her company at last found itself on solid footing.

In the succeeding years, Rees has garnered 11 Emmy Awards and 38 Emmy nominations. In 1992, just ten years after her company began, she saw her film for NBC, Miss Rose White, garner four Emmys out of ten nominations, a Golden Globe nomination, and the Humanitas Award. Ten of her productions have been aired as part of the Hallmark Hall of Fame series.

Rees has remained faithful to her vision of excellence, even in times of financial difficulty. She examines potential stories to ascertain whether they speak to her personally, and whether they will make her proud to be associated with the final product. These same concerns are reflected in the meticulous attention she and her partner give to each project once it is in production. While filming Miss Rose White in spring 1992 in Richmond, Virginia, for example, both Rees and Hopkins supervised details at every stage and personally examined each location shot for authenticity. Such care has meant that their work is usually focused on a single film at a time. Rees and Hopkins form a remarkable team, taking considerable risks, and always delivering quality products, a task made more difficult in today’s U.S. television industry.

In 1997, the partners joined with Stephen Kulczycki to form ALT Films, a nonprofit production company that in 1999 won a grant to produce five films based on American literary works for ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre’s American Collection on PBS. The adapted works were Esmeralda Santiago’s Almost a Woman, James Agee’s A Death in the Family, Eudora Welty’s The Ponder Heart, Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, and Langston Hughes’s Cora Unashamed. These five films aired from 2000 to 2002.

A champion for women’s rights in the U.S. television industry throughout her career, Marian Rees served two terms as president of Women in Film. Her service to her profession also includes board membership at the American Film Institute and the Producer’s Guild of America, where she has served as vice president. “Producer” may be an easy title to acquire in the modern television age. Few earn it, and certainly none deserve it more than Marian Rees.