"A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute." -- Terence Rattigan
Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan CBE (10 June 191130 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
1935 A Tale of Two Cities (an adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel, written with John Gielgud; it was not produced, but appeared in 1950 as a radio play)
1936 French Without Tears
1939 After the Dance
1940 Follow My Leader
1940 Grey Farm
1942 Flare Path
1943 While the Sun Shines
1944 Love in Idleness (played in U.S. as O Mistress Mine)
1946 The Winslow Boy
1948 Harlequinade
1948 The Browning Version
1948 Playbill
1949 Adventure Story
1950 Who is Sylvia? (filmed as The Man Who Loved Redheads)
1952 The Deep Blue Sea
1953 The Sleeping Prince (filmed as The Prince and the Showgirl)
1954 Separate Tables
1958 Variation on a Theme
1960 Ross
1960 Joie de Vivre, a musical version of French Without Tears, with music by Robert Stolz and song lyrics by Paul Dehn
Many of Rattigan's stage plays have been produced for radio by the BBC. The first play he wrote directly for radio was Cause Célèbre, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 27 October 1975, based on the 1935 murder of Francis Rattenbury.
A number of Rattigan's plays have been filmed (he was the screenwriter or co-writer for all those made in his lifetime):
French Without Tears (1940; Anatole de Grunwald and Ian Dalrymple were credited as screenwriters, although Rattigan also played a major role)
While the Sun Shines (1947; with de Grunwald)
The Winslow Boy (1948 and 1999)
The Browning Version (film: 1951 and 1994; TV: 1955 and 1985)
The Final Test (1953; based on his 1951 television play)
The Man Who Loved Redheads (1954; based on Who Is Sylvia?)
The Deep Blue Sea (1955)
The Prince and the Showgirl (1957; based on The Sleeping Prince)
Separate Tables (1958; Rattigan and co-writer John Gay were nominated for an Academy Award for screenwriting; David Niven won the Best Actor Oscar and Wendy Hiller won Best Supporting Actress)
A Bequest to the Nation (1973)
Cause Célèbre (1987; TV)
Original screenplays
Terence Rattigan also wrote or co-wrote the following original screenplays:
English Without Tears (1944; with Anatole de Grunwald; U.S. title Her Man Gilbey)
Journey Together (1945)
Bond Street (1948; uncredited; with de Grunwald and Rodney Ackland)
The Sound Barrier (1952; U.S. title Breaking the Sound Barrier; Rattigan's first Academy Award nomination)
The V.I.P.s (1963; Margaret Rutherford won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her performance)
The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964)
Other screenwriting
Rattigan wrote or co-wrote the following screenplays from existing material by other writers:
Quiet Wedding (1940; with Anatole de Grunwald; based on the play by Esther McCracken)
The Day Will Dawn (1942; with de Grunwald; U.S. title The Avengers; based on a treatment by Patrick Kirwan)
Uncensored (1942; with Rodney Ackland; based on the book by Oscar Millard adapted by Wolfgang Wilhelm)
The Way to the Stars (1945; from a story written by Rattigan, de Grunwald and Richard Sherman; U.S. title Johnny in the Clouds)
Brighton Rock (1947; with Graham Greene, from Greene's novel)
Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969; based on the novel by James Hilton)
