Terence Rattigan - Life and Career

Life and Career

Success as a playwright came early, with the comedy French Without Tears in 1936, set in a crammer. He had got inspiration from a 1933 visit to a village called Marxzell in the Black Forest, where young English gentlemen went to learn German, and where his time :) briefly overlapped with his Harrow classmate Jock Colville. 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. Shortly before the war, Rattigan had written (together with Anthony Maurice) a satire about Nazi Germany, Follow My Leader; the Lord Chamberlain refused to license it on grounds of offence to a foreign country, but it was performed from January 1940.

During the war, Rattigan served in the Royal Air Force as a tail gunner; his experiences helped inspire Flare Path and he was released from the service to help rewrite it as a film screenplay (which eventually appeared as The Way to the Stars in 1945). 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).

He believed in understated emotions, and craftsmanship, which was deemed old fashioned and "pre-war", after the overnight success in 1956 of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger began the era of kitchen sink dramas by the writers known as the Angry Young Men. Rattigan responded to this critical disfavour with some bitterness. His plays Ross, Man and Boy, In Praise of Love, and Cause Célèbre, however show no sign of any decline in his talent. Rattigan explained that he wrote his plays to please a symbolic playgoer, "Aunt Edna", someone from the well-off middle-class who had conventional tastes; his critics frequently used this character as the basis for belittling him. "Aunt Edna" inspired Joe Orton to create "Edna Welthorpe", a mischievous alter ego stirring up controversy about his own plays.

Rattigan was gay, with numerous lovers but no long-term partners, a possible exception being his "congenial companion and occasional friend" Michael Franklin. 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, though Rattigan claimed otherwise. 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 exploits. 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.

In 1964 Rattigan wrote to the playwright Joe Orton congratulating him on the outrageous comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane, to which Rattigan had escorted Vivien Leigh in its first week. He then chose to invest £3,000 in getting the play transferred to the West End. Although an unlikely champion of the risqué Orton, Rattigan recognised the younger man's talent and approved of what he considered a very well written piece of theatre. He also acknowledged in retrospect that, "in a way, I was not Orton's best sponsor. I'm a very unfashionable figure still, and I was then wildly unfashionable critically. My sponsorship rather put critics off, I think."

Rattigan 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 W. S. 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.

Rattigan died in Hamilton, Bermuda from bone cancer in 1977, aged 66. His cremated remains were deposited in the family vault at Kensal Green Cemetery.