Shelagh Delaney, a British playwright and screenwriter who reached the height of her literary fame at 19 as an “angry young woman” — a characterization she detested — with the premiere of her play “A Taste of Honey,” died on Sunday (24 november) at her daughter’s home in Suffolk, England. She was 72 and lived near Filey, a village in Yorkshire. The cause was heart failure and breast cancer, her daughter, Charlotte Jo Delaney, said.
A precocious young woman with a keen eye for detail and a gift for naturalistic dialogue, Ms. Delaney — her first name is pronounced Sheila — said she wrote “A Taste of Honey” in just two weeks in 1958. She had been spurred by her dislike of the genteel stage writing of Terence Rattigan, specifically the play “Variation on a Theme,” which Rattigan intended to be socially bold but which dealt only covertly with its themes of homosexuality, promiscuity and bisexuality.
“A Taste of Honey,” which was revived on Broadway in 1981 with Amanda Plummer as Jo, was the pinnacle of Ms. Delaney’s playwriting career. But though she is often listed among one-hit wonders, she wrote several screenplays, including “The White Bus” (1967), directed by Lindsay Anderson, which she adapted from one of her short stories; “Charlie Bubbles” (1967), with Albert Finney (who also directed) and Liza Minnelli, about a successful young writer who returns home from London to Manchester and struggles to cope with his good fortune in the world of commonplace deprivation he encounters there; and “Dance With a Stranger,” Mike Newell’s 1985 film, starring Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett, about Ruth Ellis, who murdered her lover and in 1955 became the last woman to be executed in Britain.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Delaney, who never married (and who always said that “A Taste of Honey” was not autobiographical), is survived by three grandchildren.
A precocious young woman with a keen eye for detail and a gift for naturalistic dialogue, Ms. Delaney — her first name is pronounced Sheila — said she wrote “A Taste of Honey” in just two weeks in 1958. She had been spurred by her dislike of the genteel stage writing of Terence Rattigan, specifically the play “Variation on a Theme,” which Rattigan intended to be socially bold but which dealt only covertly with its themes of homosexuality, promiscuity and bisexuality.
“A Taste of Honey,” which was revived on Broadway in 1981 with Amanda Plummer as Jo, was the pinnacle of Ms. Delaney’s playwriting career. But though she is often listed among one-hit wonders, she wrote several screenplays, including “The White Bus” (1967), directed by Lindsay Anderson, which she adapted from one of her short stories; “Charlie Bubbles” (1967), with Albert Finney (who also directed) and Liza Minnelli, about a successful young writer who returns home from London to Manchester and struggles to cope with his good fortune in the world of commonplace deprivation he encounters there; and “Dance With a Stranger,” Mike Newell’s 1985 film, starring Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett, about Ruth Ellis, who murdered her lover and in 1955 became the last woman to be executed in Britain.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Delaney, who never married (and who always said that “A Taste of Honey” was not autobiographical), is survived by three grandchildren.
No comments:
Post a Comment