Alan Bennett

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Alan Bennett (born May 9, 1934) is an English author and actor noted for his work, his boyish appearance and his sonorous Yorkshire accent.

Life and work

Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, Yorkshire. The son of a Co-op butcher, Bennett attended Leeds Modern School (a former state grammar school), learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his National Service, and gained a place at Cambridge University. However, having spent time in Cambridge during national service, and partly wishing to follow the object of his unrequited love, he decided to apply for a scholarship at Oxford University. He was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford University and went on to receive a first-class degree in history. While at Oxford he performed comedy with a number of future successful actors in the Oxford Revue. He was to remain at Oxford for several years researching and teaching Medieval History before deciding he was not cut out to be an academic.

He claims that as an adolescent he assumed he would grow up to be a Church of England clergyman, for no better reason than that he looked like one.

In August 1960, Bennett, along with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Peter Cook, achieved instant fame by appearing at the Edinburgh Festival in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe. After the Festival, the show continued in London and New York. He also appeared in My Father Knew Lloyd George. Bennett's first stage play, Forty Years On, was produced in 1968. Many television, stage and radio plays followed, along with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose and broadcasting, and many appearances as an actor. The recordings of Bennett's highly regarded 1966 television comedy sketch series On the Margin are notorious for having been erased.

Bennett's lugubrious yet expressive voice (which still bears a strong and distinctive Leeds accent) and the sharp humour and evident humanity of his writing have made his readings of his own work (especially his autobiographical writing) very popular. His readings of the Winnie the Pooh stories are also widely enjoyed.

Many of Bennett's characters are unfortunate and downtrodden, or meek and overlooked. Life has brought them to an impasse, or else passed them by altogether. In many cases they have met with disappointment in the realm of sex and intimate relationships, largely through tentativeness and a failure to connect with others.

Bennett is both unsparing and compassionate in laying bare his characters' frailties. This can be seen in his television plays for LWT in the late 1970s and the BBC in the early 1980s, and in the 1987 Talking Heads series of monologues for television which were later performed at the Comedy Theatre in London in 1992. This was a sextet of poignantly comic pieces, each of which depicted several stages in the character's decline from an initial state of denial or ignorance of their predicament, through a slow realization of the hopelessness of their situation, and progressing to a bleak or ambiguous conclusion. A second set of six Talking Heads pieces followed a decade later.

In his 2005 prose collection Untold Stories Bennett has written candidly and movingly of the mental illness that afflicted his mother and other family members. Much of his work draws on his Leeds background and while he is celebrated for his acute observations of a particular type of northern speech ("It'll take more than Dairy Box to banish memories of Pearl Harbor"), the range and daring of his work is often undervalued – his television play The Old Crowd, for example, includes shots of the director and technical crew, while his stage play The Lady in the Van includes two characters named Alan Bennett. The Lady in the Van was based on his experiences with a tramp called Miss Shepherd who lived on Bennett's driveway in a dilapidated van for fifteen years.

In 1994 Bennett adapted his popular and much-praised 1991 play The Madness of George III for the cinema as The Madness of King George. The film received four Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Bennett's writing and the performances of Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. It won the award for best art direction.

Bennett's critically-acclaimed The History Boys [1] won three Olivier Awards in February 2005, for Best New Play, Best Actor (Richard Griffiths), and Best Direction (Nicholas Hytner), having previously won Critics' Circle Theatre Awards and Evening Standard Awards for Best Actor and Best Play. Bennett himself received an Olivier Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Theatre [2].

The History Boys also went on to win six Tony Awards on Broadway, including best play, best performance by a leading actor in a play (Richard Griffiths), best performance by a featured actress in a play (Frances de la Tour), and best direction of a play (Nicholas Hytner).

A film version of The History Boys was released in the UK on October 13, 2006. Bennett discussed the play and its themes in an interview interview on stv.tv.

Bennett refused an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1998, in protest of its accepting funding for a named chair in honour of press baron Rupert Murdoch.[3] He also declined a CBE in 1988 and a knighthood in 1996. Despite refusing an honorary doctorate from his old university, Bennett was made an Honorary Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford in 1987. He was also awarded a D.Litt by the University of Leeds in 1990.

In September 2005, Bennett revealed that, in 1997, he had undergone treatment for cancer, and described the illness as a "bore". His chances of survival were given as being "much less" than 50%. [4]. He began Untold Stories (published 2005) thinking it would be published posthumously. In the event his cancer went into remission. In the autobiographical sketches which form a large part of the book Bennett writes openly for the first time about his homosexuality (Bennett has had relationships with women as well, although this is only touched upon in Untold Stories). Previously Bennett had referred to questions about his sexuality as being like asking a man dying of thirst to choose between Perrier or Malvern mineral water.[5]

Bennett earned Honorary Membership of The Coterie in the 2007 membership list.

Bennett has lived in London's Camden Town for thirty years, and shares his house with his partner of fourteen years, Rupert Thomas.

References

  • Peter Wolfe, Understanding Alan Bennett, University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 1-57003-280-7.
  • Alexander Games (2001). Backing Into The Limelight: The Biography of Alan Bennett. Headline. ISBN 0-7472-7030-9.
  • Joseph H. O'Mealy, "Alan Bennett: A Critical Introduction," Routledge, 2001.

Further reading

  • Robert Hewison Footlights – A Hundred Years of Cambridge Comedy, Methuen, 1983
  • Roger Wilmut From Fringe to Flying Circus – Celebrating a Unique Generation of Comedy 1960–1980, Eyre Methuen, 1980

Television work

  • My Father Knew Lloyd George (also writer), 1965
  • Famous Gossips, 1965
  • Plato—The Drinking Party, 1965
  • Alice in Wonderland, 1966
  • On the Margin series (actor & writer), 1966-67
  • A Day Out (also writer), 1972
  • Sunset Across the Bay (also writer), 1975
  • A Little Outing (also writer), 1975
  • A Visit from Miss Prothero (writer), 1978
  • Me—I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf (writer), 1978
  • Doris and Doreen (Green Forms) (writer), 1978
  • The Old Crowd (writer) with Lindsay Anderson (director), LWT 1979
  • Afternoon Off (writer), 1979
  • One Fine Day (writer), 1979
  • All Day On the Sands (writer), 1979
  • Objects of Affection (Our Winnie, A Woman of No Importance, Rolling Home, Marks, Say Something Happened, Intensive Care) (also writer), 1982
  • The Merry Wives of Windsor (actor), 1982
  • An Englishman Abroad (writer), 1983
  • The Insurance Man (writer), 1986
  • Breaking Up, 1986
  • Man and Music (narrator), 1986
  • Talking Heads (A Chip in the Sugar, Bed Among the Lentils, A Lady of Letters, Her Big Chance, Soldiering On, A Cream Cracker Under the Settee) (also writer), 1987
  • Down Cemetery Road: The Landscape of Philip Larkin (presenter), 1987
  • Fortunes of War series (actor), 1987
  • Dinner at Noon (narrator), 1988
  • Poetry in Motion (presenter), 1990
  • 102 Boulevard Haussmann (writer), 1990
  • A Question of Attribution (writer), 1991
  • Selling Hitler, 1991
  • Poetry in Motion 2 (presenter), 1992
  • Portrait or Bust (presenter), 1994
  • The Abbey (presenter), 1995
  • A Dance to the Music of Time (actor), 1997
  • Talking Heads 2, 1998
  • Telling Tales (writer, as himself), 2000

Films

Radio

  • The Great Jowett, 1980
  • Dragon, 1982
  • Uncle Clarence (writer, narrator), 1985
  • Better Halves (narrator), 1988
  • The Lady in the Van (writer, narrator), 1990
  • Winnie-the-Pooh (narrator), 1990

Stage

  • Better Late, 1959
  • Beyond the Fringe (also co-writer), 1960
  • The Blood of the Bambergs, 1962
  • A Cuckoo in the Nest, 1964
  • Forty Years On (also writer), 1968
  • Sing a Rude Song (co-writer), 1969
  • Getting On (writer), 1971
  • Habeas Corpus (also writer), 1973
  • The Old Country (writer), 1977
  • Enjoy (writer), 1980
  • Kafka's Dick (writer), 1986
  • A Visit from Miss Prothero (writer), 1987
  • Single Spies (An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution) (also writer and director), 1988
  • The Wind in the Willows (adaptation), 1990
  • The Madness of George III (writer), 1991
  • Talking Heads (Waiting for the telegram, A Chip in the Sugar, Bed Among the Lentils, A Lady of Letters, Her Big Chance, Soldiering On, A Cream Cracker Under the Settee) (also writer), 1992
  • The History Boys (writer), 2004; Winner of Tony Award for Best Play, 2006.

Publications

  • Beyond the Fringe (with Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore). London: Souvenir Press, 1962, and New York: Random House, 1963
  • Forty Years On. London: Faber, 1969
  • Getting On. London: Faber, 1972
  • Habeas Corpus. London: Faber, 1973
  • The Old Country. London: Faber, 1978
  • Enjoy. London: Faber, 1980
  • Office Suite. London: Faber, 1981
  • Objects of Affection. London: BBC Publications, 1982
  • A Private Function. London: Faber, 1984
  • Forty Years On; Getting On; Habeas Corpus. London: Faber, 1985
  • The Writer in Disguise. London: Faber, 1985
  • Prick Up Your Ears. London: Faber, 1987
  • Two Kafka Plays. London: Faber, 1987
  • Talking Heads. London: BBC Publications, 1988; New York: Summit, 1990
  • Single Spies. London: Faber, 1989
    • Winner of Olivier Award: England's best comedy for 1989
  • Single Spies and Talking Heads. New York: Summit, 1990
  • The Lady in the Van, 1989
  • Poetry in Motion (with others). 1990
  • The Wind in the Willows. London: Faber, 1991
  • Forty Years On and Other Plays. London: Faber, 1991
  • The Madness of George III. London: Faber, 1992
  • Poetry in Motion 2 (with others). 1992
  • Writing Home (memoir & essays). London: Faber, 1994 (winner of the 1995 British Book of the Year award).
  • The Madness of King George (screenplay), 1995
  • Father ! Father ! Burning Bright (prose version of 1982 TV script, Intensive Care), 1999
  • The Laying on of Hands (novella), 2000
  • The Clothes They Stood Up In (novella), 2001
  • Untold Stories (autobiographical and essays), London, Faber/Profile Books, 2005, ISBN 0-571-22830-5

Translations

French

  • Soins intensifs, 2006

German

  • Der Rote Baron, Sein letzter Flug, 2001
  • Vater, Vater, lichterloh, 2002
  • Così fan tutte, (previously published as Alle Jahre wieder) 2003
  • Die Lady im Lieferwagen, 2004
  • Handauflegen, 2005

Italian

  • La pazzia di re Giorgio, 1996
  • Nudi e crudi, 2001
  • La cerimonia del massaggio, 2002
  • La signora nel furgone, 2003
  • Signore e signori, 2004
  • Scritto sul corpo, 2006

External links

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