John Osborne Biography Quotes 14 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
John James Osborne was born on 12 December 1929 in Fulham, London, to Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a copywriter and commercial artist, and Nellie Beatrice (Nellie) Osborne, who worked at various times as a barmaid. His father died in 1941, a loss that marked him deeply and fed the sense of grievance and vulnerability that would later fuel his writing. Evacuated during the war, Osborne was educated at Belmont College in North Devon, from which he was expelled as a teenager, by his own account for striking the headmaster after a slight against his mother. After brief stints in minor jobs, including work for a trade journal, he drifted into the theatre, initially as an actor and stage manager in provincial repertory companies.

Apprenticeship in Theatre
Osborne’s early theatre years were spent on the road in rep, where the daily grind of mounting new plays gave him a working knowledge of stagecraft and an instinct for dialogue. He wrote his first play, The Devil Inside Him (1950), with the encouragement of actress-director Stella Linden. He subsequently collaborated with fellow actor and friend Anthony Creighton on Personal Enemy (1955) and Epitaph for George Dillon (staged in 1958). This apprenticeship honed both his ear for speech and his appetite for confrontation, qualities that would explode in his breakthrough work.

Look Back in Anger and the Royal Court Revolution
The turning point came with Look Back in Anger, which opened at the Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956 under the direction of Tony Richardson and the aegis of George Devine’s English Stage Company. Kenneth Haigh played the furious working-class intellectual Jimmy Porter, with Mary Ure as Alison and Alan Bates as Cliff. The critic Kenneth Tynan’s enthusiastic championing of the play helped turn it into a phenomenon. Look Back in Anger was a raw, lacerating portrait of postwar disillusionment; it gave a name and a face to Britain’s “Angry Young Men” and reshaped the ambitions of British theatre. It validated contemporary speech, class resentment, and emotional volatility onstage, and it placed the Royal Court at the center of a generational shift whose ripples would reach playwrights from Harold Pinter and Edward Bond to David Storey and beyond.

Major Plays and Themes
Osborne followed swiftly with The Entertainer (1957), written for Laurence Olivier after the great actor saw Look Back in Anger and sought a role that would speak to the present. Olivier’s Archie Rice, an exhausted music-hall comic, became a symbol of national decline as the Suez crisis unspooled. Thereafter Osborne remained a defining voice of British drama for more than a decade:
- Epitaph for George Dillon (with Anthony Creighton, 1958) offered a bleak portrait of frustrated artistry and compromised family life.
- Luther (1961), with Albert Finney in the title role at the Royal Court, traced Martin Luther’s spiritual crisis and revolt, reflecting Osborne’s fascination with authority, faith, and moral rage; it earned acclaim in London and New York.
- Inadmissible Evidence (1964) presented the disintegration of a London solicitor, a study in self-loathing and verbal assault.
- A Patriot for Me (1965), about the scandal of Austrian officer Alfred Redl, ran afoul of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship; its struggles, alongside Edward Bond’s Saved, hastened the abolition of stage censorship in 1968.
- Hotel in Amsterdam (1968), an elegant, acid comedy set among film-industry exiles, won the Evening Standard Award.

Across these works Osborne made theatrical poetry of grievance and contempt, detesting cant in public life and sentimentality in private. His characters often lash out with language as their chief weapon; many are trapped between longing for love and the compulsion to wound.

Screenwriting and Film
Osborne wrote or adapted several screenplays, most notably Tom Jones (1963), directed by Tony Richardson from Henry Fielding’s novel. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Osborne received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Film versions of The Entertainer (1960) and Look Back in Anger (1959) extended his reach, while later adaptations of Inadmissible Evidence (1968) and Luther (1974) kept his voice visible on screen. His cinema work, though less voluminous than his stage output, revealed a flair for narrative propulsion and sardonic humor.

Circle and Collaborators
Osborne’s professional life was bound up with a key circle at the Royal Court:
- George Devine, the Royal Court’s visionary artistic director, provided the institutional shelter for Osborne’s early breakthroughs.
- Tony Richardson, director and close associate, staged Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer and collaborated on films.
- Kenneth Tynan, the Observer’s drama critic and later a dramaturg at the National Theatre, was his most influential early advocate.
- Actors who defined and extended his work included Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Haigh, Mary Ure, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Nicol Williamson, and Jill Bennett.
- Fellow writers and contemporaries, Harold Pinter, John Arden, Edward Bond, and others, either followed him at the Royal Court or engaged with the world he helped make possible.

Personal Life
Osborne’s private life was turbulent and frequently public. He married five times:
- Pamela Lane (1951, 1957), an actress he met in repertory
- Mary Ure (1957, 1963), the original Alison in Look Back in Anger, who later married the actor Robert Shaw
- Penelope Gilliatt (1963, 1968), the novelist and film critic; they had a daughter, Nolan
- Jill Bennett (1968, 1977), the accomplished actress whose marriage to Osborne was stormy and whose later suicide in 1990 cast a posthumous shadow over their years together
- Helen Dawson (1978 until his death), a journalist and arts administrator, with whom he found late stability

Osborne’s two-volume autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991), is as combative as his plays, a scorched-earth self-portrait that spares few adversaries and wrestles with his complicated feelings toward his mother, his country, and his profession. The books are invaluable documents of postwar British theatre and Osborne’s stubborn, self-scrutinizing temperament.

Later Years and Death
From the 1970s onward, Osborne’s commercial fortunes waned even as his reputation as a pathbreaker remained secure. He continued to write, among later pieces were West of Suez (1971), Watch It Come Down (1975), and Déjàvu (1991), a late sequel that revisited Jimmy Porter in middle age. He moved to Shropshire, settling at The Hurst near Clunton with Helen Dawson, where he cultivated a quieter domestic life punctuated by writing, occasional journalism, and fierce letters to newspapers.

John Osborne died on 24 December 1994 at his home in Shropshire, aged 65, from complications related to diabetes.

Legacy and Influence
Osborne’s arrival with Look Back in Anger transformed British theatre. He legitimized contemporary speech and working-class experience on the main stage and gave theatrical form to a generation’s discontent in the austerity and frustration of postwar Britain. The Royal Court revolution he helped ignite, alongside George Devine, Tony Richardson, and Kenneth Tynan, reconfigured the ecology of British drama, clearing space for Pinter’s menace, Bond’s ferocity, and the later ironies of writers like David Hare and Caryl Churchill. The fights around A Patriot for Me contributed to ending stage censorship in 1968, reshaping the freedoms available to playwrights.

If his later work polarized critics, his best plays retain their voltage, the verbal pyrotechnics, the moral impatience, the uneasy blend of sentiment and savagery. Through The Hurst, later associated with the Arvon Foundation as a center for writers, Osborne’s final home became a place for new voices to develop, a fitting coda for a dramatist who forced British theatre to speak in a new key.

Our collection contains 14 quotes who is written by John, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Never Give Up - Meaning of Life - Writing - Mortality.

Other people realated to John: Karel Reisz (Director), Terence Rattigan (Dramatist)

• John Osborne famous Works: Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Luther, Inadmissible Evidence, A Patriot for Me, Déjàvu.
• How old was John Osborne? He became 65 years old

• 1968 The Hotel in Amsterdam (Play)
• 1965 A Patriot for Me (Play)
• 1964 Inadmissible Evidence (Play)
• 1961 Luther (Play)
• 1957 The Entertainer (Play)
• 1956 Look Back in Anger (Play)

• Wikipedia