Noel Coward

16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973. Director, performer, playwright, singer and composer, most famously known for the Englishness of his works.

He was born in Teddington, a middle-class suburb of London into a musically active family. During his childhood and youth he already starred in various plays and began to write poems, short stories and songs. He later moved on to write plays himself in which he could appear as well.

But his career would not come into full swing until he met Gilbert Miller, an American producer, who suggested the idea for the light comedy I'll leave it to you, which opened in London in 1920. He wrote and starred in it as well. Four years after he would experience his first critical and financial success with The Vortex (1924). His plays are characterized by their wittiness and the unsentimental representation of emotional affairs. Most of his works deal with intricate love triangles and ever-changing love affairs, often reflecting the bohemian lifestyle of artists, writers and actors and of course the lifestyle of the Bright Young Things. Coward cultivated a public image of himself associated with cocktails and style. His homosexuality does not figure explicitly in the plays (but is alluded to and discernible for those "in the know"). Although, of course, his work is "essentially independent of his personal life" (Levin 4).

Influenced by the American Broadway, he introduced its speed "into staid British drama and music to create high-octane rush for the jazz-mad, dance-crazy 1920s" (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002021/bio). But after World War II his new plays did not prove to be as successful as his earlier works, because he was a signature model for writers of well-made plays with class attitudes, which was regarded old-fashioned at that time. This caused Coward to become embittered and to condemn the writer generation of the 1950s and 1960s.

At the end of the 1960s he began to suffer from arteriosclerosis and memory losses and therefore drew back from professional and public life. He died in 1973 of heart failure. At his memorial service a poem was read out (and also written) by John Betjeman in honour of Coward and his works.

Sources:

Cunningham, Valerie: British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Levin, Milton: Noel Coward. Updated Edition. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

--Manu1988 22:39, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

--Manu1988 22:36, 23 January 2012 (UTC)