Background
Alan Bennett was born on May 9, 1934 in Armley, Leeds, Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom. He was a son of Walter and Lilian Mary (Peel) Bennett.
Actor playwright screenwriter author
Alan Bennett was born on May 9, 1934 in Armley, Leeds, Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom. He was a son of Walter and Lilian Mary (Peel) Bennett.
Alan Bennett attended Christ Church, Upper Armley, Church of England School, and then Leeds Modern School (now Lawnswood School). He attended Oxford University.
Bennett has done film scripts for hire: The Insurance Man (85, Richard Eyre); A Private Function (85, Malcolm Mowbray), on the treasuring of a pig in postwar provincial England; Prick Up Your Ears (87, Stephen Frears), his least adroit work in that it chose to dramatize writer John Lahr’s inquiry into the life of playwright Joe Orton, and thus missed too much of the life.
Then he has done scripts, as it were, from the heart. In particular, there are two works that have saved the reputation of John Sehlesinger: An Englishman Abroad (84), which is derived from actress Coral Browne’s meeting with the exiled spy Guy Burgess in Moscow; and A Question of Attribution (91), taken from Bennett's own play about Sir Anthony Blunt, scholarly guardian of the Queen's paintings—which included a delicious, dreamlike, and very subversive conversation between Blunt and HRII (James Fox and Prunella Scales; though it was Bennett himself and Ms. Scales on the London stage).
Ostensibly, Bennett the Yorkshireman, son of a butcher and then scholarship boy at Oxford, someone uneasy far away from London NW1 or Yorkshire, is a patriot as well as a determined, gloorm loner. Yet beneath the comedy of the two plays/films, (here is so much rueful passion for the urge to remake England and such wistfulness about irregular sexual conduct. And so the passing triumph oi Burgess and Blunt—in lixing well and in knowing the grace of Tiepolo—is all the more tender because they are losing point in Bennetts England. These are very sly works, as befits stories about spies.
3. Then there are “plays” written for television, especially a series of five done in 1978-79: Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Stephen Frears), narrated by Bennett, a study in health, happiness, and indefatigable unease; All Day in the Sands (Giles Foster; produced by Frears), on the desolation of seaside getaways; One Fine Day (Frears); The Old Crowd (Lindsay Anderson, produced by Frears); Afternoon Off (Frears).
These are Bennett’s great works, plays about a society and its slow sighing way toward demise. It is no coincidence that the plays precede the violence of Mrs. Thatcher and seem to feel the last ebbing of the old England that cherished its humdrum decency. The stories are slight; the acting is communal. And these plays are also the best work Stephen Frears has ever done—a nagging question to him about why he ever went to America.
4. Talking Heads, six dramatic monologues— no, adramatic—done for BBC TV in 1988. These are shattered lives, no matter that the broken pieces are held politely together in the way a humble soldier on the Somme might have held his privates in place waiting for his turn with the surgeon. They are all from thirty to lifts minutes long, and they are one character chatting or sighing to the camera—they catch the woeful intimacy in which in the TV age lonely people talk to themselves as if in interview. The form is as poignant as the words or the performances. To see the six in a row is to erv out tor some explosive energy that would destroy gentility once and for all. There is a passivity here that must count as Bennetts most profound limitation. But the SLX are beautiful black portraits:
Maggie Smith in Bed Among the Lentils (Bennett);
Patricia Routledge in A Lady of Letters (Foster);
Stephanie Cole in Soldiering On (Tristram Powell);
Thora Hird in A Cream Cracker Under the Settee (Stuart Burge);
Julie Walters in Her Big Chance (Foster);
Bennett himself in A Chip in the Sugar (Burge).
He adapted his own play to make the film. The Madness of King George (94, Nicholas Hytner), and in 1996 a second series of Talking Heads played on the BBC. This series was as exquisite as the first, but the darkness and the shift towards crime and suicide was far more marked.
In 1960, when Beyond the Fringe opened at the Edinburgh Festival, and in its glorv years thereafter, Alan Bennett was the least known and spectacular of the team. By now, a case could be made that his work and his influence have risen far above that of the others. But as to being known. Bennett is the very image of privacy, and that alone could qualify him for a notable place in this survey of the most glaring and overpublicized of media.
Bennett has become a major figure in the English landscape despite versatility and his steadfast wish to remain hidden. He has worked very little in what he might call ‘the cinema." Yet he commands a place, and a large one. For he is one of those people who have kept England’s role in movies significant even as its picture business has withered. Principally, he has worked in television. But Bennett’s influence is climatic: he is an astrin-gent dampener that seeps in everywhere—in theatre, prose, and journalism, almost in the way of snif fing the air suspiciously. Bennett is a model for the notion that wintry wariness may be the surest way to memorialize the passage of feelings in this headlong world. Just as Noel Coward's collected talents, works, words, and pauses once delivered a kind of moral briskness that represented an age, so Bennett now is characteristic. He may be Britain’s best and most stubborn surviving miniaturist.
To keep up with Alan Bennett, one needs to be in England all the time, for he is always popping up in some shape or manner, on television or in a literary weekly. ( His other works include the stage play The Madness of George III.) Nothing is to be treated lightly: he is a gatherer of his own small things, a genius of the quotidian, a master of one-line roles or glances off in mid-interview.