Winner of both the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for a distinguished play by an American author and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play of 1999, Wit now comes to the screen as an HBO movie starring two-time Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson and directed by Mike Nichols. When it was first performed in New York City in 1999, Wit was a revelation to critics and audiences alike. "A brutally human and beautifully layered play... You will feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted," raves Peter Marks of the New York Times.

Wit is centered on Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., an accomplished but emotionally remote scholar of seventeenth-century poetry who in the face of imminent death learns the power and importance of simple acts of human kindness. The reassessment of her life and her work is done with a passion and humor that are both moving and redemptive.