| Terrence 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 of Irish extraction, educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford , and his plays are generally situated within an upper middle class background. LIFE AND CAREER Success as a playwright came early, with the comedy '''' (1946), '' The Browning Version '' (1948), '' The Deep Blue Sea '' (1952), and '' Separate Tables '' (1954). Rattigan believed in understated emotions, and craftsmanship, which after the overnight success of class="copylinks">John Osbourne 's '[[Look Back In Anger '' in 1956 was deemed old fashioned. Rattigan responded to his critical disfavour with some bitterness. Some churlish interviews served only to confirm the view that he had no sympathy or understanding of the modern world. His plays '' Ross '', '' Man And Boy '', '' In Praise Of Love '', and '' Cause Célèbre '', however show no sign of any decline in his talent. He was Homosexual , with numerous lovers but no long-term partners. It has been claimed that his work is essentially autobiographical, containing coded references to his sexuality, which he kept secret from all but the closest friends. There is some truth in this, but it risks being crudely reductive, for example the repeated claim that Rattigan originally wrote '' The Deep Blue Sea '' as a play about male lovers, turning into a heterosexual play at the last minute, is unfounded. His female characters are written as females and are in no sense 'men in drag'. He was diagnosed as having Leukemia in 1962 and recovered two years later, but fell ill again in 1968. He disliked the Swinging Britain of the 1960s and moved abroad, living in Bermuda , and living off lucrative 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 revival of '' The Deep Blue Sea '', at the Almeida Theatre , London, directed by Karel Reisz , Rattigan has increasingly been seen as one of the century's finest playwrights, an expert choreographer of emotion, and an anatomist of human emotional pain. A string of successful revivals followed, including Man And Boy at the Duchess Theatre, London, in 2005, with David Suchet as Gregor Antonescu , and In Praise Of Love at the Chichester Festival Theatre and Separate Tables at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 2006. His play on the last days of Nelson , ''A Bequest to the Nation'' was revived on Radio 4 for Trafalgar 200 , starring Janet McTeer as Lady Hamilton, Kenneth Branagh as Nelson, and Amanda Root as Lady Nelson. STAGE PLAYS
TELEVISION PLAYS
Several of his later plays were adapted for film and/or television. The best-known are:
RADIO PLAY Many of Rattigan's stage plays have been produced for radio by the BBC. The first play he wrote directly for radio was Cause Célèbre, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 27th October 1975, based on the 1935 murder of Francis Rattenbury . TRIVIA
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