Terence Rattigan wrote polished plays about the feelings people hide
Terence Rattigan was among England's most popular dramatists of the mid-20th century, author of The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea and Separate Tables. A gay man in an era of secrecy, he filled his well-made drawing-room plays with repression, reticence and relationships that fail.
Born in South Kensington in 1911, the son of a diplomat, he went to Harrow, where he played for the cricket First XI and made 29 against Eton in 1929. He also organised a mutiny in the school's cadet corps and tipped off the Daily Express, to his headmaster's fury. After Trinity College, Oxford, success arrived fast with French Without Tears in 1936, a comedy drawn from a 1933 stay in a Black Forest village where young Englishmen went to learn German.
In the Second World War he flew as an RAF tail gunner, which fed into Flare Path, later reworked for the film The Way to the Stars. The postwar decade brought his strongest run of hits. Then in 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger launched the Angry Young Men, and Rattigan's craftsmanship suddenly looked dated. He had admitted writing for Aunt Edna, an imaginary conventional theatregoer, and critics used her against him for years. Joe Orton later mocked the idea with his own alter ego, Edna Welthorpe.
Rattigan was generous all the same. He invested £3,000 to move Orton's dark comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane into the West End. Diagnosed with leukaemia in 1962, he retreated to Bermuda and for a time earned more than any other screenwriter alive from films such as The Yellow Rolls-Royce. His script for Separate Tables earned an Academy Award nomination.
Knighted in 1971, only the fourth playwright honoured that way in the century, he died of bone cancer in Hamilton, Bermuda, in 1977. His reputation has since recovered through revivals, from a 1993 Deep Blue Sea at the Almeida to a 2011 centenary season and a Terence Davies film.
Source: Terence Rattigan
