John James Osborne was one of the most famous British playwrights who changed the face of the British theatre. Before he arrived on the theatrical scene, the British theatre consisted mainly of melodramas and safe, middle class drawing-room comedies. He has written several screenplays. Osborne was the first to question the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. He was an 'angry young man' who spent his happiest years in Shropshire.
Background
John James Osborne was born in December 12, 1929 in London in a working-class family. His father, Thomas Godfrey Osborne, was a commercial artist and advertising copywriter, came from the South of Wales , and his mother, Nellie Beatrice, was a Cockney barmaid. He adored his father and hated his mother.
Education
Osborne used insurance money after his father’s death in 1941 for a boarding-school education at Belmont College, Devon, where there were some incidents. Once director, having caught him listening to records of F. Sinatra hit him, John did the same. He was suspended from the summer semester exams for this and subsequently received a certificate with low scores, not reflecting his natural intelligence and talent.
Career
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. 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.
Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) brought a revolution to English theater as its protagonist, Jimmy Porter, voiced the protests of a generation seething with dissatisfaction.
The so-called "angry young men" felt there were no good causes left to die for.
In his most famous play, Osborne castigated the hypocrisy of the lower middle class with his excoriating wit.
Look Back in Anger, Corliss wrote, was "drama as rant, an explosion of bad manners, a declaration of war against an empire in twilight" and "a self-portrait of the artist as an angry young man. "
That successful play was followed by The Entertainer (1957), the story of Archie Rice, a seedy, bitter, middle-aged music hall entertainer who suffers from his inability to communicate with his family or with his audiences.
Look Back in Anger became a film in 1958, and The Entertainer was made into a movie in 1960, starring Laurence Olivier.
Osborne's own outraged feelings and his provocative honesty charged his best plays with a strident, sometimes desperate note as he attacked the failure of the right and left, both literary and political, to improve the quality of life in modern Britain.
His "acid tone, at once comic and desperate, " according to Corliss of Time, remained sharp throughout his career, reflected in screenplays such as Tom Jones (1993).
Achievements
Works
Other Work
Inadmissible Evidence
Interests
Osborne was a great fan of Max Miller (comedian).
Connections
Osborne was married five times with all except his final marriage being unhappy unions.