John Osborne

John James Osborne (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, and entrepreneur.

Born in London, he briefly worked as a journalist before starting out in theatre as a stage manager and actor.

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 [we] 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.

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.

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, joining 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 then directed it at the Theatre Royal in Huddersfield in 1950.

In June 1951 Osborne married Pamela Lane.

He lived in poverty for several years before his third produced play, Look Back in Anger (1956), brought him national fame.

Based on his volatile relationship with his first wife, Pamela Lane, it marked him as part of a wider cultural and literary movement in post-WWII Britain known as kitchen sink realism, which utilised social realist depictions of domestic situations to address disillusionment with British society in the waning years of the Empire.

The phrase "angry young man", used by theatrical press officer George Fearon to describe the play, was subsequently used as the name for a loosely-defined group of predominantly working class and left-wing writers within this movement, with Osborne considered its leading figure.

The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961), and Inadmissable Evidence (1964) were also well-received, Luther winning the 1964 Tony Award for Best Play.

In 1958 he partnered with Look Back in Anger director Tony Richardson and film producer Harry Saltzman to form Woodfall Film Productions, in order to produce the 1959 film adaptation of Anger, also directed by Richardson.

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 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 newly formed 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.

Under Richardson's leadership, Woodfall went on to produce some of the most celebrated British films of the 1960s, many of them part of the British New Wave which grew out of kitchen sink realism.

These include adaptations of the Entertainer (1960), and Inadmissible Evidence (1968), both written or co-written by Osborne, as well as Tom Jones (1963), for which he won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.

Osborne was known for his often controversial left-wing politics in his youth, but critics nevertheless noted a conservative strain in his writing even in his early works; and in later life his public image shifted to that of a country gentleman; for the last eight years of his life he lived in rural Shropshire, during which time he wrote a diary for the conservative magazine The Spectator.

Reception to his later plays was overall less favourable, and he returned to acting via a handful of film roles in the 1970s, most notably as crime boss Cyril Kinnear in Get Carter (1971) and an Arborian Priest in Flash Gordon (1980), both directed by Mike Hodges.

His final marriage, from 1978 until his death, was to the journalist Helen Dawson.

He wrote a two-volume autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981), and Almost a Gentleman (1991).

His final play was Déjàvu (1992), a sequel to Look Back in Anger, and in 1994 he published a collection of his non-fiction writings, Damn You, England.

He was married five times, but the first four were marred by frequent affairs and his mistreatment of his partners.

He suffered from diabetes in his later years, dying from complications of the disease on 24 December 1994 at the age of 65.