Jerome Kilty, 90, Actor and Playwright, Dies Jerome Kilty, an actor and playwright known for writing epistolary dramas - most notably "Dear Liar," his adaptation of 40 years of amorous correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and one of the London theater's most temperamental actresses - died on Sept. 6 in Norwalk, Conn. Leslie Silberman, a friend, said Mr. Kilty died of cardiac arrest the day after a car collision in his hometown, Weston, Conn. Mr. Kilty's acting career took him from Broadway (where he appeared in seven productions and was acclaimed for his role in the 1984 revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Moon for the Misbegotten") to regional and repertory theaters. His credits include roles in almost every one of Shaw's plays. He was the cowardly Spintho in a 1948 production of "Androcles and the Lion" and Caesar in the Hartford Stage Company's 1985 production of the same play. In 1990, at the Roundabout Theater in New York, he portrayed the burbling Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington in "The Doctor's Dilemma." But what brought Mr. Kilty his greatest attention was his two-character play "Dear Liar," which he created by culling the dozens of letters Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell wrote to each other. Although their affair ended, their correspondence continued for four decades. "We are like lustless lions at play," Mrs. Campbell once wrote. "Dear Liar" was first staged in 1960 on Broadway, starring Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne. Mr. Kilty himself would portray Shaw (for many years with his wife, Cavada Humphrey, playing Mrs. Campbell) as he presented the play in theaters in France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere. It was the first of what Mr. Kilty called his " "dear" plays." The others include "Dear Love," based on the correspondence between the poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and "Dear Life," inspired by the letters exchanged between Anton Chekhov and his wife, Olga Knipper. Jerome Timothy Kilty was born in Baltimore on June 24, 1922, but was raised on an Indian reservation in Southern California where his father, a federal agent, was charged with overseeing a Navajo community. While serving in the Army Air Forces in London during World War II, Mr. Kilty saw the headline "Shaw Likes Yanks" in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. "I thought maybe he'd like me, so my buddy and I got on our bikes and knocked on his door," he said. I don't remember what he said, but he received us cordially. Mr. Kilty attended Harvard under the G.I. Bill, and in 1948 he helped found the Brattle Theater Company in Cambridge, Mass. By the early 1950s, he was appearing on television shows like "Kraft Television Theater" and "Hallmark Hall of Fame." Mr. Kilty's wife died in 2007. No immediate family members survive. After knocking on Shaw's door, Mr. Kilty immersed himself in Shavian studies. He wrote his most famous play after exploring the trove of letters that had been found in a hatbox under Mrs. Campbell's bed after she died in 1940.