John James Osborne
Actor literary critic playwright screenwriter writer
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.
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.
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).
Osborne's work transformed the British theatre. 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 he was sure 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.
Osborne was one of the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. He was the first to question the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. During his peak (1956–1966), he helped to make contempt an acceptable and now even cliched onstage emotion, argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behaviour and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit.
Inadmissible Evidence
Osborne was a great fan of Max Miller (comedian).
Osborne was married five times with all except his final marriage being unhappy unions.
