John Osborne
born Dec. 12, 1929, London, Eng.
died Dec. 24, 1994, Shropshire
British playwright and film producer whose
Look Back in Anger (performed 1956) ushered
in a new movement in British drama and made
him known as the first of the “Angry Young
Men”.
The son of a commercial artist and a
barmaid, Osborne used insurance money from
his father’s death in 1941 for a boarding-
school education at Belmont College, Devon.
He hated it and left after striking the
headmaster. He went home to his mother in
London and briefly tried trade journalism
until a job tutoring a touring company of
juvenile actors introduced him to the
theatre. He was soon acting himself, later
becoming an actor-manager for various
repertory companies in provincial towns and
also trying his hand at playwriting. His
first play, The Devil Inside Him, was
written in 1950 with his friend and mentor
Stella Linden, an actress and one of
Osborne’s first passions.
Osborne made his first appearance as a
London actor in 1956, the same year that
Look Back in Anger was produced by the
English Stage Company. Although the form of
the play was not revolutionary, its content
was unexpected. On stage for the first time
were the 20- to 30-year-olds of Great
Britain who had not participated in World
War II and found its aftermath shabby and
lacking in promise. The hero, Jimmy Porter,
although the son of a worker, has, through
the state educational system, reached an
uncomfortably marginal position on the
border of the middle class from which he can
see the traditional possessors of privilege
holding the better jobs and threatening his
upward climb. Jimmy Porter continues to work
in a street-market and vents his rage on his
middle-class wife and her middle-class
friend. No solution is proposed for Porter’s
frustrations, but Osborne makes the audience
feel them acutely.
Osborne’s next play, The Entertainer
(1957), projects a vision of a contemporary
Britain diminished from its days of
self-confidence. Its hero is a failing
comedian, and Osborne uses the decline of
the music-hall tradition as a metaphor for
the decline of a nation’s vitality. In 1958
Osborne and director Tony Richardson founded
Woodfall Film Productions, which produced
motion pictures of Look Back in Anger
(1959), The Entertainer (1959), and, from a
filmscript by Osborne that won an Academy
Award, Tom Jones (1963), based on the novel
by Henry Fielding.
Luther (1961), an epic play about the
Reformation leader, again showed Osborne’s
ability to create an actably rebellious
central figure. His two Plays for England
(1962) include The Blood of the Bambergs, a
satire on royalty, and Under Plain Cover, a
study of an incestuous couple playing games
of dominance and submission.
The tirade of Jimmy Porter is resumed in
a different key by a frustrated solicitor in
Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence (1964). A
Patriot for Me (1965) portrays a homosexual
Austrian officer in the period before World
War I, based on the story of Alfred Redl,
and shows Osborne’s interests in the decline
of empire and the perils of the
nonconformist. West of Suez (1971) revealed
a measure of sympathy for a type of British
colonizer whose day has waned and antipathy
for his ideological opponents, who are made
to appear confused and neurotic. Osborne’s
last play, Déjàvu (1992), a sequel to Look
Back in Anger, revisits Jimmy Porter after a
35-year interval.
As revealed in the first installment of
Osborne’s autobiography, A Better Class of
Person (1981), much of the fire in Look Back
in Anger was drawn from Osborne’s own early
experience. In it he attacks the mediocrity
of lower-middle-class English life
personified by his mother, whom he hated,
and discusses his volatile temperament. The
second part of his autobiography appeared in
1991 under the title Almost a Gentleman.
Osborne was married five times.
Having come to the stage initially as an
actor, Osborne achieved note for his skill
in providing actable roles. He is also
significant for restoring the tirade—or
passionately scathing speech—to a high place
among dramatic elements. Most significantly,
however, he reoriented British drama from
well-made plays depicting upper-class life
to vigorously realistic drama of
contemporary life.
