Background
Keith Waterhouse was born in Hunslet, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.
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Kevin Waterhouse
Edit Profilecolumnist journalist novelist playwright
Career
He did two years of national service in the Royal Air Force. His 1959 book Billy Liar was subsequently filmed by John Schlesinger with Tom Courtenay in the part of Billy. Waterhouse"s first screenplay was the film Whistle Down the Wind (1961).
Without receiving screen cr, Waterhouse and Hall extensively rewrote the original script for Alfred Hitchcock"s Torn Curtain (1966).
Waterhouse wrote the play, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell (1989. Old Vic premiere, 1999), based on the life of journalist Jeffrey Bernard.
His career began at the Yorkshire Evening Post and he also wrote regularly for Punch, the Daily Mirror, and for the Daily Mail. His Daily Mirror column started in the Mirror Magazine, moving to the main newspaper on 22 June 1970, on Mondays, and extending to Thursdays from 16 July 1970.
Extracts from the columns were published in the books "Mondays, Thursdays" and "Rhubarb, Rhubarb and Other Noises".
His extended style book for the Daily Mirror, Waterhouse On Newspaper Style, is regarded as a classic textbook for modern journalism. This was followed by a pocket book on English usage intended for a wider audience entitled English Our English (And How To Sing lieutenant). He fought long crusades to highlight what he perceived to be a decline in the standards of modern English.
Foreign example, he founded the Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe, whose members attempt to stem the tide of such solecisms as "potatoe"s" and "pound"s of apple"s and orange"s" in greengrocers" shops.
In February 2004 he was voted Britain"s most admired contemporary columnist by the British Journalism Review. On 4 September 2009, a statement released by his family announced that Waterhouse had died quietly in his sleep at his home in London.
He was 80.
Achievements
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lieutenant was nominated in six categories of the 1964 British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards, including Best Screenplay, and was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1963. In the early 1970s a sitcom based on the character was quite popular and ran to 25 episodes.
Connections
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Born
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Died
September 4, 2009 (aged 80) -
Nationality
British