John Osborne

The Oscar-winning screenwriter John Osborne, better known as one of the most important British playwrights of the 1950s generation that revolutionized English-speaking theater, was born on December 12, 1929 in London, England. His father, Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a native of Newport, Monmouthshire, was a copywriter, and his mother, Nellie, was a Cockney barmaid. John's father died in 1941 when he was 11 years old. The insurance settlement allowed him to go to Belmont College, Devon. After completing school, Osborne did not go on to university but returned to London to live with his mother, where he tried to make it as a journalist. He was introduced to the theater through a job tutoring a touring company of junior actors. Smitten by the theater, he became a stage manager and actor, eventually becoming a member of Anthony Creighton's provincial touring company. Osborne wrote his second play, "Personal Enemy", in collaboration with Anthony Creighton (their "Epitaph for George Dillon" would be staged at the Royal Court in 1958, after Osborne had broken through as a solo artist with the watershed production of "Look Back in Anger", also at the Royal Court). Look Back in Anger (1959), which opened on May 8, 1956 at the Royal Court, the 11th anniversary of V-E Day (the surrender of Germany and the cessation of hostilities in the European theater of World War II), was revolutionary, as it gave voice to the working class. A press agent came up with the phrase "Angry Young Man" that would stick to Osborne and his compatriots, who created a new type of theater rooted in Bertolt Brecht and class consciousness. Though it initially received mix reviews, the play was a smash in London,and it made the transfer to Broadway, where it ran for a year. "Look Back in Anger" was nominated for a 1958 Tony Award for Best Play (Osborne and producer David Merrick, Best Actress in a Play (Mary Ure, whom Osborne made his second wife), and Best Costume Design (The Motley). It eventually was made into a movie starring Richard Burton and directed by Tony Richardson. Laurence Olivier had taken Arthur Miller and his wife Marilyn Monroe to see the play when Olivier was shooting The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) in London with MM. Olivier was abashed by the play, but Miller convinced him of its greatness as a theatrical work. Olivier, sensing a sea-change in culture that could make actors of his ilk obsolete, engaged Osborne to write a play for him, and the playwright followed up "Anger" with another brilliant work, The Entertainer (1960). Olivier reinvented himself as well as realigned himself with the new youth movement shaking the theater, giving a tour de force performance as Archie Rice, a down-at-the-heels, third-rate music hall entertainer facing emigration to Canada or oblivion. Osborne used the decline of the music hall, once the premier venue of British entertainment, as a metaphor for the post-war decline of the British Empire in light of the recent debacle in Suez, when the U.K., France and Israel were rebuffed by Egypt and the U.S. when the three countries invaded Egypt to seize the recently nationalized Suez Canal. Osborne's career continued strong in the 1960s. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Tony Richarson's movie version of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1963), which won Richardson an Oscar as Best Director and was named Best Picture of 1963. He followed this success up with his last great play Luther (1974), in which the cinematic Tom Jones, Albert Finney, won raves playing Osborne's take on Martin Luther, the man who revolutionized Christianity 1,500 years after The Christ. Fitting, that the rebel, the protester Osborne would take on the father of Protestantism. The play, first performed in England in 1961 and transferred to Broadway in 1963, won Osborne a 1964 Tony Award for Best Play, as well as a Tony Award nomination for Albert Finney. (Laurence Olivier had received his sole Tony nomination for "The Entertainer" when he had brought his legendary performance to Broadway.) Other important plays followed. "Inadmissible Evidence", first performed in 1964, made Nicol Williamson a star (both Osborne and Williamson were nominated for Tony Awards in 1966 after the show transferred to Broadway). His other major play, "A Patriot for Me" (London debut 1965), dealt with the blackmailing of the Austro-Hungarian officer Colonel Redl (also dramatized in István Szabó's Colonel Redl (1985)), who was a homosexual and possibly a Jew in a pre-World War One society that was virulently anti-gay and anti-semitic. The production of the play helped erode theatrical censorship in Britain. The Lord Chamberlain, the theatrical censor in Britian, was opposed to the play and denied it the exhibition license the theater needed to put on public shows due to its frank depiction of homosexuality. In exchange for an exhibition license, The Lord Chamberlain demanded multiple cuts, which would have resulted in the excision of half the play, according to Alan Bates in a B.B.C. interview during a 1983 revival of the play. Osborne and The Royal Court refused, and -- denied a license -- the theater had to be turned into a private club in order to produce the play in London as to produce it legitimately would have been impossible as half the play would have been censored. "A Patriot for Me" won "The Evening Standard" Best Play of the Year award (as would one of his latter plays, "The Hotel in Amsterdam" in 1968), though it was a succes d'estime, the theater taking a heavy loss on the production. The year 1968 was a watershed in Osborne's professional life. Not only is 1968 the year that the counterculture "won", sweeping away all before it (and whose effects, as well as detritus, has yet to be replaced by anything else), it was the year of his last successful play, "The Hotel in Amsterdam", and the year that Tony Richardson's masterful satire The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) -- based on a screenplay by Osborne -- was released. He would not enjoy the same success as he had in the 1950s and '60s in the latter part of his life. Starring Maximilian Schell, "A Patriot for Me" was not a success on Broadway, lasting but 49 performances in 1969, testifying to Osborne's decreasing commercial prowess in the theater, which once again was undergoing a revolution, but from the anarchist left with such productions as Tom O'Horgan's Hair (1979). The five-times married Osborne died from complications of diabetes on December 24, 1994, two weeks after his 65th birthday. His last produced play was "Déjà Vu" (1991), a sequel to his first great success, "Look Back in Anger". His legacy was a transformed British theater, which had broken its links to the ossified D'Oly D'Carte of the former generation, in which the theater was more about elocution by actors playing toffs than it was about life as lived by most Britons. Osborne and the legions of playwrights he influenced made language important, as well as introduced an emotional intensity into the theater. Osborne and his brethren used the theater as a soapbox on which to attack class barriers (and a theater which reinforced those class distinctions).