Christopher Isherwood

26 August 1904 (High Lane, Cheshire County) - 4 January 1986 (Santa Monica, California). Novelist and playwright. Briefly married to Erika Mann.

Christopher Isherwood went to school together with W.H. Auden who was to become a lifelong friend (and occasional lover). Isherwood read history at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. He also studied medicine at King's College in London but he did not finish his studies. Instead he went on a trip to Germany to visit Auden with whom he also had an occasional sexual relationship.

Isherwood staid in Berlin from 1929 to 1933. Among other places he lived in Berlin-Schöneberg where a plaque commemorates his resdidence. In Berlin he also met his first regular boyfriend Heinz Neddemayer. Isherwood was intrigued by the Weimar Republic and the sexual freedom which existed there and which ceased to exist when the National Socialists came to power in 1933.

In 1935 he married Erika Mann so that she could get the British citizenship.

In 1939 Isherwood emigrated to California where he worked as freelance and screenwriter for various Hollywood Studios. From 1959 to 1962 he worked as a visting professor for Modern English Literature at the Los Angeles State College.

He lived in a relationship with Don Bachardy (who was 30 years younger than Isherwood) as a respectable couple in Hollywood. Although McCarthy's policy was highly homophobic, Isherwood and Bachardy lived their homosexuality openly. The partnership lasted until Isherwood's death in 1986. In 1946 Isherwood obtained the American citizenship.

Isherwood is renowned for his short stories and novels. In Kathleen and Frank (1971) he tells the story of his parents and himself at the turn of the century. Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) provide an inside view into the last days of the Weimar Republic. The stories formed the basis for John Van Druten's play I am a Camera (1951) and were later turned into the musical Cabaret (1966) - probably best-known in the film version of 1972 starring Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles.

In Christopher and His Kind (1976) Isherwood tells the story of his time in Berlin exploring the queer German subculture. In 2011 Christopher and his Kind was turned into a movie by Geoffrey Sax starring Matt Smith.

The movie A Single Man (2009) adapts Isherwood's novel of the same name (first published in 1964). It is directed by the fomer Gucci Designer Tom Ford starring Julian Moore and Collin Firth as the protagonist George Falconer, an homosexual university professor who is not able to organise his life after the sudden death of his lifelong partner. Collin Firth received a BAFTA in 2010 as the best actor.

Sources:

Piazza, Paul (1978): Christopher Isherwood: Myth and Anti-Myth. New York: Colombia University Press.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1315981/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ztfl9

http://kirjasto.sci.fi/isherwoo.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/christopher-isherwood

http://www.perlentaucher.de/artikel/5953.html

http://www.nndb.com/people/844/000048700/