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John OsborneEnglish playwright.
Date of Birth: 12.12.1929
Country:  Great Britain |
Content:
- John Osborne: Biography of an English Playwright
- John Osborne passed away in Shropshire on December 24, 1994.
John Osborne: Biography of an English Playwright
John Osborne was an English playwright who gained fame in 1956 with the premiere of his play Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre. He was born on December 12, 1929, in London. In his youth, Osborne worked as an actor and spent his free time writing poetry and plays. It was after the successful premiere of Look Back in Anger in 1956 that he achieved widespread recognition.
Two years later, Osborne and director T. Richardson founded the film studio "Woodfall," for which Osborne wrote several screenplays, including adaptations of his own plays Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, as well as a novel by G. Fielding, Tom Jones. For the latter work, the playwright received an Academy Award.
One of Osborne's strengths as a writer was his ability to create vivid and memorable characters and engaging dialogues. Many of his plays revolve around individuals who are dissatisfied with the state of society and express their total disillusionment and anger towards those around them through extensive and bitter monologues. The protagonist of Look Back in Anger, an intellectual who comes from a working-class background, consistently attacks traditional institutions such as the church, the military, and British aristocracy.
In The Entertainer (1957), Osborne presents a cynic and compere from the music hall, whose profession symbolizes the vulgarity of a decaying England, while also expressing nostalgia for a bygone era. The main character Luther (1961) is a man obsessed with his own interpretation of Christianity but plagued by doubts. Unlike Osborne's other characters, he is meant to change the world.
In Inadmissible Evidence (1964), an aging and emotionally drained lawyer pours out his frustration with the world and his own inadequacies through endless bitter monologues.
Among Osborne's other plays are Epitaph for George Dillon (1958, co-written with E. Creighton), The Blood of Bambergs (1962), Under Plain Cover (1962), A Subject of Scandal and Concern (1963), The Bond Honored (1966), Time Present (1968), West of Suez (1971), and The End of Me Old Cigar (1975). He also wrote two volumes of autobiography: A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991).
