| Terence Rattigan |
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Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan ( June 10 1911 – November 30 1977 ) was one of England 's most important 20th Century Dramatist s. He was born in London, England of Irish Protestant extraction and educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford , and his work to some extent reflects this privileged and intellectual background. LIFE AND CAREER Success as a playwright came early, with the light comedy '''' (1946), '' The Browning Version '' (1948), '' The Deep Blue Sea '' (1952), and '' Separate Tables '' (1954). Rattigan believed in craftsmanship, structure, and his plays find their emotions in the depths. This all became very old-fashioned after 1956 when John Osborne's '' and the Liberal Party , and some of the better work of the last twenty years of his life, like '' Ross '', '' Man And Boy '', '' In Praise Of Love '', and '' Cause Célèbre '', which stand up with the finest of his other work. He was homosexual, with a string of lovers but no long-term partners. It has been said that most of his work is autobiographical, containing many coded references to his sexuality and the issues it raised in a society in which he was forced to keep this part of himself secret from all but the closest friends. He was diagnosed as having Leukemia in 1962 and recovered 2 years later, but again fell ill in 1968 . He disliked the Swinging Britain of the 1960s and moved abroad, living for the rest of the sixties in Bermuda , and living off lucrative, but forgettable screenplays (for a time he was the highest-paid screenwriter in the world). He was knighted in the early seventies and moved back to Britain where he experienced a minor revival in his reputation before his death from Bone Cancer in 1977 at the age of 66. Fifteen years after his death, largely through a magnificent revival of '' The Deep Blue Sea '', at the Almeida Theatre , London, directed by Karel Reisz, Rattigan came to be seen as one of the century's finest playwrights, an expert choreographer of staged emotion, an anatomist of human emotional pain. In 2005, Man And Boy was revived at the Duchess Theatre, London, with David Suchet as Gregor Antonescu . Several of his later plays were adapted for film and/or television. The best-known are:
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A Biography by Clifford A. Ridley, Knight-Ridder Newspapers |
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