John Osborne
John James Osborne was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, and entrepreneur, who is regarded as one of the most influential figures in post-war theatre. Born in London, he briefly worked as a journalist before starting out in theatre as a stage manager and actor. He lived in poverty for several years before his third produced play, Look Back in Anger, brought him national fame.
Based on Osborne's volatile relationship with his first wife, Pamela Lane, it is considered the first work of kitchen sink realism, initiating a movement which made use of social realism and domestic settings to address disillusion with British society in the waning years of the Empire. The phrase “angry young man”, coined by George Fearon to describe Osborne when promoting the play, came to embody the predominantly working class and left-wing writers within this movement. Osborne was considered its leading figure due to his often controversial left-wing politics, though critics nevertheless noted a conservative strain even in his early writing.
The Entertainer, Luther, and Inadmissable Evidence were also well-received, Luther winning the 1964 Tony Award for Best Play, though reception to his later plays was less favourable. During this period Osborne began writing and acting for television and appearing in films, most notably as crime boss Cyril Kinnear in Get Carter.
In 1958, Osborne joined Look Back in Anger director Tony Richardson and film producer Harry Saltzman to form Woodfall Film Productions, in order to produce Richardson's 1959 film adaptation of Anger and other works of kitchen sink realism, spearheading the British New Wave. This included Osborne-penned adaptations of the Entertainer , and Inadmissible Evidence, as well as the period comedy Tom Jones, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay.
Osborne was married five times, but the first four were troubled by affairs and his mistreatment of his partners. In 1978 he married Helen Dawson, and from 1986 they lived in rural Shropshire. He wrote two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person and Almost a Gentleman, and a collection of his non-fiction writing, Damn You, England, was published in 1994. He died from complications of diabetes on 24 December of that year at the age of 65.
Early life
Osborne was born on 12 December 1929 in London, the son of Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a commercial artist and advertising copywriter of South Welsh ancestry, and Nellie Beatrice Grove, a Cockney barmaid.In 1936, the family moved to the north Surrey suburb of Stoneleigh, where Thomas's mother had already settled. Osborne, however, would regard it as a cultural desert – a school friend declared subsequently that "he thought were a lot of dull, uninteresting people." He adored his father but hated his mother, whom he described as "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent."
Thomas Osborne died in 1940, leaving the young boy an insurance settlement which he used to pay for a private education at Belmont College, a minor public school in Barnstaple, Devon. He entered the school in 1943, but was expelled in the summer term of 1945. Osborne claimed this was for hitting the headmaster, who had struck him for listening to a broadcast by Frank Sinatra, but another former pupil asserted that Osborne was caught fighting with other pupils and did not assault the headmaster. A School Certificate was the only formal qualification he acquired.
Career
After school, Osborne went home to his mother in London and briefly tried trade journalism. A job tutoring a touring company of junior actors introduced him to the theatre. He soon became involved as a stage manager and actor and joined Anthony Creighton's provincial touring company. Osborne tried his hand at writing plays, co-writing his first, The Devil Inside Him, with his mentor Stella Linden, who directed it at the Theatre Royal in Huddersfield in 1950. In June 1951 Osborne married Pamela Lane. His second play, Personal Enemy, was written with Anthony Creighton, with whom he later wrote Epitaph for George Dillon, staged at the Royal Court in 1958. Personal Enemy was staged in regional theatres before he submitted Look Back in Anger.''Look Back in Anger''
Look Back in Anger was written in 17 days in a deck chair on Morecambe pier where Osborne was performing in Hugh Hastings' play Seagulls over Sorrento in a repertory theatre. Osborne's play is largely autobiographical, based on his time living, and arguing, with Pamela Lane in cramped accommodation in Derby, while she had an affair with a local dentist. It was submitted to several agents in London, who rejected it. In his autobiography, Osborne writes: "The speed with which it had been returned was not surprising, but its aggressive dispatch did give me a kind of baffled relief. It was like being grasped at the upper arm by a testy policeman and told to move on". Finally it was sent to the new English Stage Company at London's Royal Court Theatre.Formed by actor-manager and artistic director George Devine, the company had seen its first two productions perform disappointingly. Devine was prepared to gamble on this play because he saw in it a powerful articulation of a new post-war spirit. Osborne was living on a houseboat with Creighton at Cubitts Yacht Basin in Chiswick on the River Thames at the time and eating stewed nettles from the riverbank. When Devine accepted the play, he had to row out to the houseboat to speak to Osborne. The play was directed by Tony Richardson and starred Kenneth Haigh, Mary Ure and Alan Bates. George Fearon, a press officer at the theatre, used the phrase "angry young man" when promoting Look Back in Anger. He told Osborne that he disliked the play and feared it would be impossible to market.
Reviews of Look Back in Anger were mixed: most of the critics who attended the first night felt it was a failure. Positive reviews from Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson, however, plus a TV broadcast of Act 2, helped create interest, and the play transferred successfully to the Lyric Theatre and to Broadway, later touring to Moscow. A film version was released in May 1959 with Richard Burton and Mary Ure in the leading roles. The play brought Osborne fame and won him the Evening Standard Drama Award as the most promising playwright of 1956.
During production Osborne, then married, began a relationship with Mary Ure, and would divorce his wife, Pamela Lane, to marry Ure in 1957. Ure died in 1975.
''The Entertainer'' and into the 1960s
When he first saw Look Back in Anger, Laurence Olivier had a poor opinion of the play. At the time, Olivier was making a film of Rattigan's The Prince and the Showgirl co-starring Marilyn Monroe, and she was accompanied to London by her husband Arthur Miller. Olivier asked the American dramatist what plays he might want to see in London. Based on its title, Miller suggested Osborne's work; Olivier tried to dissuade him, but the playwright was insistent and the two of them saw it together.Miller found the play revelatory, and they went backstage to meet Osborne. Olivier was impressed by the American's reaction and asked Osborne for a part in his next play. George Devine, artistic director of the Royal Court, sent Olivier the incomplete script of The Entertainer. Olivier eventually took the central role as failing music-hall performer Archie Rice, playing successfully both at the Royal Court and in the West End.
The Entertainer uses the metaphor of the dying music hall tradition and its eclipse by early rock and roll to comment on the declining influence of the British Empire and its eclipse by the increasing influence of the United States, as illustrated during the Suez Crisis of November 1956 which forms the backdrop to the play. The Entertainer found critical acclaim.
Osborne followed The Entertainer with The World of Paul Slickey, a musical that satirizes the tabloid press; the televised documentary play A Subject of Scandal and Concern ; and the double bill Plays for England, comprising The Blood of the Bambergs and Under Plain Cover.
Luther, depicting the life of Martin Luther, was first performed in 1961; it transferred to Broadway and won Osborne a Tony Award. Inadmissible Evidence was first performed in 1964. In between these plays, Osborne won an Oscar for his 1963 screenplay adaptation of Tom Jones. His 1965 play, A Patriot for Me, draws on the Austrian Redl case, involving themes of homosexuality and espionage, and helped to end the system of theatrical censorship under the Lord Chamberlain.
Both A Patriot For Me and The Hotel in Amsterdam won Evening Standard Best Play of the Year awards. The Hotel in Amsterdam features three showbiz couples in a hotel suite, having fled a tyrannical movie producer, referred to as "K.L." Osborne's biographer John Heilpern asserts that "K.L." was meant to represent director and producer Tony Richardson.
1970s and later life
John Osborne's plays in the 1970s included West of Suez, starring Ralph Richardson; 1975's The End of Me Old Cigar; and Watch It Come Down, starring Frank Finlay. Theatre historian Phyllis Hartnoll wrote that Osborne's work of this period "failed to enhance his reputation": his fellow playwright Alan Bennett recalled "frozen embarrassment" at the premiere of Watch It Come Down, though Richard Ellmann, reviewing an early performance, noticed unintentional audience laughter.Perhaps his most harshly received work from this era was A Sense of Detachment, which has no plot and features a scene where an elderly lady recites at length from a hardcore porn catalogue. Part of the play involves actors planted in the audience pretending to protest, though after this began to trigger actual heckling, actress Rachel Kempson leapt into the stalls and assaulted some of the troublemakers in a much publicised incident. A representative review in the Financial Times declared, "This must surely be an end to his career in the theatre".
During that decade Osborne played the role of gangster Cyril Kinnear in Get Carter. Later, he appeared in Tomorrow Never Comes and Flash Gordon.
Osborne's later public image differed from his 'angry young man' persona of the 1950s. From 1986, Osborne and his wife Helen lived at The Hurst, near Clunton in rural Shropshire. Increasingly his life resembled that of an old-fashioned country gentleman. He wrote a diary for conservative British magazine The Spectator, a publication that when young he had been contemptuous of. He raised money for the local church roof by opening his garden to the public, and threatened to withdraw funding for this unless the vicar restored the Book of Common Prayer. Ferdinand Mount draws a contrast between this devotion to Anglican ritual and the opening of Look Back in Anger, with Jimmy Porter railing against the sound of church bells. In 2003 the Osbornes' residence was opened as a residential retreat for writers by the Arvon Foundation.
In the last two decades of his life Osborne published two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person and Almost a Gentleman. Reviewing the first of these books, Alan Bennett wrote, "It is immensely enjoyable, is written with great gusto and Osborne has had better notices for it than for any of his plays since Inadmissible Evidence." A Better Class of Person was filmed by Thames Television in 1985, featuring Eileen Atkins and Alan Howard as his parents, and Gary Capelin and Neil McPherson as Osborne. It was nominated for the Prix Italia.
Osborne's last play was Déjàvu, a sequel to Look Back in Anger. Various of his newspaper and magazine writings appeared in a collection entitled Damn You, England, while his two autobiographical volumes were reissued as Looking Back – Never Explain, Never Apologise.