Alan Bennett
born May 9, 1934, Leeds, Yorkshire,
Eng.
British playwright who was best known for
The Madness of George III (1991) and The
History Boys (2004).
Bennett attended Leeds Modern School and
gained a scholarship to Exeter College,
Oxford, where he received an undergraduate
degree in history in 1957. His fledgling
career as a junior lecturer in history at
Magdalen College, Oxford, was cut short
after he enjoyed enormous success with the
comedy revue Beyond the Fringe in 1960. He
coauthored and starred in the show with
Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley
Moore, and the foursome played to packed
houses in Edinburgh, London, and New York
City. Bennett’s first play, Forty Years On,
was produced in 1968 and starred John
Gielgud. It was followed by numerous plays,
films, and television serials; a
best-selling collection of Bennett’s diaries
and reminiscences, titled Writing Home
(1994); and several pieces for radio. In
1987 Talking Heads, a series of monologues
for television, made him a household name
and earned him the first of six Lawrence
Olivier Awards (annual theatre awards
established in 1976 as the Society of West
End Theatre Awards). The Madness of George
III premiered at the National Theatre in
1991, and the 1994 film adaptation, The
Madness of King George, secured several
Academy Award nominations, including one for
Bennett’s screenplay.
Bennett’s special talent was his
translation of the mundane into tragicomic
dramas, and he was able to employ his
characteristic light touch even when writing
about intellectual heavyweights such as
Wittgenstein or Kafka. Bennett fearlessly
scrutinized the British class system,
propriety, and England’s north-south
cultural divide with results that were
simultaneously chilling and hilarious.
Meanwhile, his gift for creating an
authentic dialogue for the “ordinary people”
of his own background sat curiously beside
his ability to portray the manners of middle
and upper classes. It was Bennett’s
diversity of talent that delighted audiences
and led critics to hail him as one of the
premier playwrights of the day.
Bennett’s play The History Boys garnered
both the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award and
the Laurence Olivier Award for best new
play, and Bennett also received the Olivier
Special Award. Set in Yorkshire in the
1980s, the play featured a clash of values
between two teachers coaching a class of
state-school boys through their university
entrance examinations. It succeeded both as
a serious-minded critique of Britain’s
education system—then and now—and as a
superbly comic entertainment. A 2006 film
version of The History Boys followed the
play, which won six Tony Awards after its
debut on Broadway in the same year.
In September 2005 his fans were
introduced to a new side of Bennett when he
published the memoir Untold Stories, in
which he looked back affectionately at his
parents, poignantly reflected on his
mother’s descent into senility and her death
in a nursing home, and revealed for the
first time that he had received treatment
for what had been believed to be terminal
cancer.
Siobhan Dowd
