Helen Prejean her best-selling book, "Dead Man Walking" (1993), based on her experiences with two convicts on Death Row for whom she served as spiritual adviser before their executions. In her book, she explored the effects of the death penalty on everyone involved. The book was adapted as a 1995 film of the same name, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. It was also adapted as an opera, first produced in 2000 by the San Francisco Opera. Helen Prejean was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the daughter of Augusta Mae (née Bourg; 1911–1993), a nurse, and Louis Sebastian Prejean (1893–1974), a lawyer.
Helen (play) root of all evil. About thirty years before this play, Herodotus argued in his "Histories" that Helen had never in fact arrived at Troy, but was in Egypt during the entire Trojan War. The Archaic lyric poet Stesichorus had made the same assertion in his "Palinode" (itself a correction to an earlier poem corroborating the traditional characterization that made Helen out to be a woman of ill repute). The play "Helen" tells a variant of this story, beginning under the premise that rather than running off to Troy with Paris, Helen was actually whisked away to Egypt by the gods.