Terrence Rattigan Biography
Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan CBE (10 June 1911 - 30 November 1977) was one of England's most popular 20th century dramatists. His plays are generally situated within an upper-middle-class background. He is known for such works as The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version and Separate Tables, among many others. He was also a screenwriter, mainly of his own plays.
Early life
Terence Rattigan was born in 1911 in South Kensington, London of Irish Protestant extraction. He had an elder brother, Brian. They were the grandsons of Sir William Henry Rattigan, a notable Indian-based jurist, and later a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament for North East Lanarkshire. His father was Frank Rattigan CMG, a diplomat whose exploits included an affair with Princess Elisabeth of Romania (future consort of King George II of Greece) which resulted in her having an abortion.
Rattigan's birth certificate and his birth announcement in
The Times both state he was born on 9 June 1911. However, most reference books state that he was born on 10 June, and Rattigan himself never publicly disputed this date. There is evidence suggesting that the date on the birth certificate is incorrect. He was given no middle name, but he adopted the middle name "Mervyn" in early adulthood.
Education
Rattigan was educated at two independent schools: at Sandroyd School from 1920–1925, at the time based in Cobham in Surrey (and now the home of Reed's School), and Harrow School, in Harrow on the Hill in north-west London. Rattigan played cricket for the Harrow First XI and scored 29 in the Eton-Harrow match in 1929. He subsequently went to Trinity College at the University of Oxford.
Life and career
Success as a playwright came early, with the comedy
French Without Tears in 1936, set in a crammer. Rattigan's determination to write a more serious play produced
After the Dance (1939), a satirical social drama about the "bright young things" and their failure to politically engage. The outbreak of the Second World War scuppered any chances of a long run. After the war, Rattigan alternated between comedies and dramas, establishing himself as a major playwright: the most famous of which were
The Winslow Boy (1946),
The Browning Version (1948),
The Deep Blue Sea (1952), and
Separate Tables (1954).
He was also friends with Tony Goldsmith who was one of Spike Milligan's junior officers during his time with the Royal Artillery in the Second World War. When Goldsmith died in the Battle for Longstop Hill in April 1943 after being caught in a mortar bombardment, Rattigan wrote an obituary in the Times for him. (This comes from Spike Milligan's War Memoirs)
Rattigan believed in understated emotions, and craftsmanship, which after the overnight success of John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger in 1956 was deemed old fashioned. Rattigan responded to his critical disfavour with some bitterness. Some churlish interviews served only to confirm the view that he had no sympathy or understanding of the modern world. His plays
Ross,
Man and Boy,
In Praise of Love, and
Cause Célèbre, however show no sign of any decline in his talent.
Rattigan was gay, with numerous lovers but no long-term partners. It has been claimed that his work is essentially autobiographical, containing coded references to his sexuality, which he kept secret from all but his closest friends. There is some truth in this, but it risks being crudely reductive; for example, the repeated claim that Rattigan originally wrote
The Deep Blue Sea as a play about male lovers, turned at the last minute into a heterosexual play, is unfounded. On the other hand, for the Broadway staging of
Separate Tables, he wrote an alternative version of the newspaper article in which Major Pollock's indiscretions are revealed to his fellow hotel guests; in this version, the people the Major approached for sex were men rather than young women. However, Rattigan changed his mind about staging it, and the original version proceeded.
Rattigan was fascinated with the life and character of T. E. Lawrence. In 1960 he wrote a play called
Ross, based on Lawrence's expoits. Preparations were made to film it, and Dirk Bogarde accepted the role. However, it did not proceed because the Rank Organisation withdrew its support, not wishing to offend David Lean and Sam Spiegel, who had started to film
Lawrence of Arabia. Bogarde called Rank's decision "my bitterest disappointment".
Also in 1960, a musical version of
French Without Tears was staged as
Joie de Vivre, with music by Robert Stolz of
White Horse Inn fame. It starred Donald Sinden, lasted only four performances, and has never been revived.
He was diagnosed as having leukaemia in 1962 and recovered two years later, but fell ill again in 1968. He disliked the so-called Swinging London of the 1960s and moved abroad, living in Bermuda, where he lived off the proceeds from lucrative screenplays including
The V.I.P.s and
The Yellow Rolls-Royce. For a time he was the highest-paid screenwriter in the world.
He was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours of June 1971 for services to the theatre, being only the fourth playwright to be knighted in the 20th century (after Sir William Schwenk Gilbert in 1907, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero in 1909 and Sir Noël Coward in 1970). He had been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in June 1958. He moved back to Britain, where he experienced a minor revival in his reputation before his death. He died in Hamilton, Bermuda from bone cancer in 1977 at the age of 66.
Fifteen years after his death, largely through a revival of
The Deep Blue Sea, at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Karel Reisz, Rattigan has increasingly been seen as one of the century's finest playwrights, an expert choreographer of emotion, and an anatomist of human emotional pain. A string of successful revivals followed, including
The Winslow Boy at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2001 (with David Rintoul, and subsequently on tour in 2002 with Edward Fox),
Man and Boy at the Duchess Theatre, London, in 2005, with David Suchet as Gregor Antonescu, and
In Praise of Love at Chichester, and
Separate Tables at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 2006. His play on the last days of Lord Nelson,
A Bequest to the Nation, was revived on Radio 4 for Trafalgar 200, starring Janet McTeer as Lady Hamilton, Kenneth Branagh as Nelson, and Amanda Root as Lady Nelson. Thea Sharrock directed his rarely-seen
After the Dance in the summer of 2010 at London's Royal National Theatre.
Sharrock will also direct a major new production of Rattigan's final and also rarely seen play
Cause Célèbre at The Old Vic in March 2011 as part of The Terence Rattigan Centenery year celebrations. As well as this, Trevor Nunn will also mark the occasion with a West End revival of Flare Path at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, between March and June 2011. The latter of these will star Sienna Miller, James Purefoy and Sheridan Smith.
Source: Wikipedia Terrence Rattigan page
