George Bernard Shaw

The Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, acquired a reputation as the greatest dramatist in the English language during the first half of the 20th Century for the plays he had written at the height of his creativity from "Mrs.

Warren's Profession" in 1893 to "The Apple Cart" in 1929.

His works have been revived on Broadway from 1894 to 2010.

Unlike other prominent authors, GBS refused to sell the screen rights to his plays, but would only license them for renewable five-year periods - thus his first major film, the successful Arms and the Man (1932) (for which he also wrote the screenplay, as he did the later Pascal productions - winning an Best Screenplay Oscar in 1938 for his adaptation of "Pygmalion") is today a "lost" film because its license was not renewed due to Shaw's feeling that by 1937 advances in sound technology made the 1932 sound too archaic.With that exception, until 1938, film versions of his plays were either unauthorized by him or had not met with his approval. He supervised, wrote the screenplays for, and had creative control over three film versions of his plays-- the Pygmalion (1938), the Major Barbara (1941), and the Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). He agreed to cut some of the dialogue for the "Pygmalion", and it turned out to be the most cinematic of the three films that he was involved with, but he added entire scenes to "Major Barbara" while becoming more sensitive to the idea of having to cut his dialogue, and "Caesar and Cleopatra" was filmed intact, with only minor additions. "Caesar and Cleopatra" was the first authorized film of a Shaw play to receive some harsh criticism, but it has become a classic since its original release. Shaw also prepared a screenplay for his play, "Saint Joan", unproduced in his lifetime, but closely adapted by Graham Greene for the 1957 Otto Preminger production half a decade after Shaw's death.Unfortunately, Shaw's system of five-year licenses, while not benefiting less high profile playwrights (and fortunately only resulting in one major lost Shaw film), inspired later copyright attorneys who used it as a template to license film clips to documentary and other film makers, making the reissue of older documentaries and films a nightmare of rights clearance issues.

First person to receive a Nobel Prize and an Oscar (Pygmalion (1938)). When songwriter Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, he became the second person.

"Major Barbara" at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre was awarded the 1971 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Distinguished Production.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". Volume 105, pg. 371-378. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, Inc., 1990.

His play, "Heartbreak House" at the Writers' Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for the 2011 Equity Joseph Jefferson Award for Production of a Play (Large).