John Osborne

Osborne was born on 12 December 1929[3] in London, the son of Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a commercial artist and advertising copywriter of South Welsh extraction, and Nellie Beatrice Grove, a Cockney barmaid.[4]

In 1935 the family moved to the north Surrey suburb of Stoneleigh, near Ewell, in search of a better life, though Osborne would regard it as a cultural desert – a schoolfriend declared subsequently that "he thought [we] were a lot of dull, uninteresting people, and probably a lot of us were. He was right."[5] He adored his father and hated his mother, who he later wrote taught him "The fatality of hatred … She is my disease, an invitation to my sick room", and described her as "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent."

Thomas Osborne died in 1941, leaving the young boy an insurance settlement which he used to finance a private education at Belmont College, a minor public school in Barnstaple[6] that closed in the 1960s.[7] 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 other pupils and did not assault the headmaster.[8] 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 acting, joining Anthony Creighton's provincial touring company.[9] 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 he also married Pamela Lane.[10] 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,[11] based on his time living, and arguing, with Pamela Lane in cramped accommodation in Derby while she cuckolded him with a local dentist.[12] 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 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 three productions flop and urgently needed a success if it was to survive. 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 on the River Thames at the time with Creighton, eating stewed nettles from the riverbank. So keen was Devine to contact Osborne that he rowed out to the boat to tell him he would like to make the play the fourth production to enter repertory. The play was directed by Tony Richardson and starred Kenneth Haigh, Mary Ure and Alan Bates. George Fearon, a part-time press officer at the theatre, invented the phrase "angry young man". He told Osborne that he disliked the play and feared it would be impossible to market.[13]

In 1993, a year before his death, Osborne wrote that the opening night was "an occasion I only partly remember, but certainly with more accuracy than those who subsequently claimed to have been present and, if they are to be believed, would have filled the theatre several times over". Reviews were mixed. Most of the critics who attended the first night felt it was a failure, and it looked as if the English Stage Company was going to go into liquidation.[14] Milton Shulman in the Evening Standard, for example, called the play "a failure" and "a self-pitying snivel". But the following Sunday, Kenneth Tynan of The Observer – the most influential critic of the day – praised it to the skies: "I could not love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger", he wrote, "It is the best young play of its decade". Harold Hobson of The Sunday Times called Osborne "a writer of outstanding promise". During production the married Osborne began a relationship with Mary Ure, and would divorce his wife, Pamela Lane, to marry Ure in 1957.

The play became an enormous commercial success, transferring to the West End and Broadway, and touring to Moscow. A film version was released in May 1959 with Richard Burton and Mary Ure in the leading roles. The play turned Osborne from a struggling playwright into a wealthy and famous angry young man and won him the Evening Standard Drama Award as the most promising playwright of 1956.

Osborne by Irish artist Reginald Gray, London (1957)

When he first saw Look Back in Anger, Laurence Olivier was dismissive, viewing the play as unpatriotic and bad theatre, "a travesty on England".[15] At the time, Olivier was making a film of Rattigan's The Prince and the Showgirl co-starring Marilyn Monroe, and she was accompanied to London by her then-husband Arthur Miller. Olivier asked the American dramatist what plays he might want to see in London. Based on its title, Miller suggested Osborne's work; Olivier tried to dissuade him, but the playwright was insistent and the two of them saw it together.

Miller found the play revelatory, and they went backstage to meet Osborne. Olivier was impressed by the American's reaction, and asked Osborne for a part in his next play. John Heilpern suggests the great actor's about-face was due to a midlife crisis, Olivier seeking a new challenge after decades of success in Shakespeare and other classics, and fearful of losing his pre-eminence to this new kind of theatre. George Devine, artistic director of the Royal Court, sent Olivier the incomplete script of The Entertainer (1957, film version released in 1960) and Olivier initially wanted to play Billy Rice, the lead character's decent elderly father. On seeing the finished script, he changed his mind and took the central role as failing music-hall performer Archie Rice, playing to great acclaim both at the Royal Court and then in the West End.[15]

The Entertainer uses the metaphor of the dying music hall tradition and its eclipse by early rock and roll to comment on the moribund state of the British Empire and its eclipse by the power of the United States, something flagrantly revealed during the Suez Crisis of November 1956 that elliptically forms the backdrop to the play. An experimental piece, The Entertainer was interspersed with music hall performances. Most critics praised the development of an exciting writing talent:

A real pro is a real man, all he needs is an old backcloth behind him and he can hold them on his own for half an hour. He's like the general run of people, only he's a lot more like them than they are themselves, if you understand me.

The words are Billy Rice's, though as with much of Osborne's work they could be said to represent his own sentiments, as with this quote from Look Back in Anger:

Oh, heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm—that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out 'Hallelujah! Hallelujah. I'm alive!'

Osborne followed The Entertainer with The World of Paul Slickey (1959) a musical that satirizes the tabloid press, the unusual television documentary play A Subject of Scandal and Concern (1960), and the double bill Plays for England, comprising The Blood of the Bambergs and Under Plain Cover (1962).

Luther, depicting the life of Martin Luther, the archetypal rebel of an earlier century, was first performed in 1961; it transferred to Broadway and won Osborne a Tony Award. Inadmissible Evidence was first performed in 1964. In between these plays, Osborne won an Oscar for his 1963 screenplay adaptation of Tom Jones. A Patriot for Me (1965) drawing on the Austrian Redl case, is a tale of turn-of-the-century homosexuality and espionage which helped to end (along with Saved by Edward Bond) the system of theatrical censorship under the Lord Chamberlain.

Both A Patriot For Me and The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968) won Evening Standard Best Play of the Year awards. The latter play features three showbiz couples in a hotel suite, having fled a tyrannical and unpleasant movie producer, referred to as "K.L." John Heilpern[16] confirms the rumour that "K.L." was in fact a portrait of Tony Richardson, seen through Osborne's eyes. Laurie, a screenwriter, a role created by Paul Scofield, is a self-portrait: Osborne at mid-career.

John Osborne's plays in the 1970s included West of Suez which starred Ralph Richardson, A Sense of Detachment, first produced at the Royal Court in 1972, and the disappointing Watch It Come Down, first produced at the National Theatre, starring Frank Finlay.

During that decade Osborne made his best-remembered acting appearance, lending gangster Cyril Kinnear a sense of civil menace in Get Carter (1971). Later, he appeared in Tomorrow Never Comes (1978), as an actor, and Flash Gordon (1980).[17]

Throughout the 1980s Osborne played in his real life the role of Shropshire squire with great pleasure and a heavy dose of irony.[18] He wrote a diary for The Spectator.[19] He opened his garden to raise money for the church roof, from which he threatened to withdraw covenant-funding unless the vicar restored the Book of Common Prayer (he had returned to the Church of England in about 1974).[20]

In his latter years Osborne published two remarkably frank volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (Osborne, 1981) and Almost a Gentleman (Osborne, 1991). A Better Class of Person was filmed by Thames Television in 1985, featuring Eileen Atkins and Alan Howard as his parents, and Gary Capelin and Neil McPherson as Osborne. It was nominated for the Prix Italia. At his memorial service in 1995, a playwright of the next generation, David Hare, said:

It is, if you like, the final irony that John's governing love was for a country which is, to say the least, distrustful of those who seem to be both clever and passionate. There is in English public life an implicit assumption that the head and the heart are in some sort of opposition. If someone is clever, they get labelled cold. If they are emotional, they get labelled stupid. Nothing bewilders the English more than someone who exhibits great feeling and great intelligence. When, as in John's case, a person is abundant in both, the English response is to take in the washing and bolt the back door.

His last play was Déjàvu (1991), a sequel to Look Back in Anger. Various newspaper and magazine writings appeared in a collection entitled Damn You, England (1994), while the two volumes of autobiography were reissued as Looking Back – Never Explain, Never Apologise (1999).

Osborne was a great fan of Max Miller[21] and saw parallels between them. 'I love him (Max Miller), because he embodied a kind of theatre I admire most. 'Mary from the Dairy' was an overture to the danger that (Max) might go too far. Whenever anyone tells me that a scene or a line in a play of mine goes too far in some way then I know my instinct has been functioning as it should. When such people tell you that a particular passage makes the audience uneasy or restless, then they seem (to me) as cautious and absurd as landladies and girls-who-won't.'[22]

Osborne's work transformed British theatre.[23] He helped to make it artistically respected again, throwing off the formal constraints of the former generation, and turning our attention once more to language, theatrical rhetoric, and emotional intensity. He saw theatre as a weapon with which ordinary people could break down the class barriers and that he had a 'beholden duty to kick against the pricks'. He wanted his plays to be a reminder of real pleasures and real pains. David Hare said in his memorial address:

John Osborne devoted his life to trying to forge some sort of connection between the acuteness of his mind and the extraordinary power of his heart.[24]

Osborne did change the world of theatre, influencing playwrights such as Edward Albee and Mike Leigh. However, work of his kind of authenticity and originality would remain the exception rather than the rule. This did not surprise Osborne; nobody understood the tackiness of the theatre better than the man who had played Hamlet on Hayling Island.[25] He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writer's Guild of Great Britain.

Osborne joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1959. Later he drifted to the libertarian, unorganized right, considering himself "a radical who hates change".

After a serious liver crisis in 1987, Osborne became diabetic, injecting insulin twice a day. He died in 1994 from complications from his diabetes at the age of 65 at his home in Clunton, near Craven Arms, Shropshire.[46] He is buried in St George's churchyard, Clun, Shropshire. His last wife, Helen Dawson, who died in 2004, is buried next to him.

Osborne began placing his papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1960s, with additions made throughout his life and by relatives in the years after his death. The primary archive is over 50 boxes and includes typescripts and manuscripts for all of his works, correspondence, newspaper and magazine articles, scrapbooks, posters, programmes, and business documents.[47]

In 2008, the Ransom Center purchased an additional archive of over 30 boxes that had been held by Helen Dawson Osborne. While largely focusing on the latter years of Osborne's life, the collection also includes a series of notebooks that he had kept separately from his original archive.[48]

• Parliament & the 1960s - 1966 Theatre Censorship Committee - UK Parliament Living Heritage
• John Osborne Papers at the Harry Ransom Center
• John Osborne and Helen Dawson Osborne Collection at the Harry Ransom Center
• Select Papers of the English Stage Company at the University of Leeds
• Quotations related to John Osborne at Wikiquote
• John Osborne at the BFI's Screenonline
• 'A Poor Jonah': John Osborne's Roads to Freedom describing the discovery of John Osborne's pre-Look Back in Anger plays at the British Library
• Portraits of John Osborne at the National Portrait Gallery, London