[40], In 1924, Coward achieved his first great critical and financial success as a playwright with The Vortex. Despite this impressive cast, Coward's popularity had risen so high that the theatre poster for the production used an Al Hirschfeld caricature of Coward (pictured) [n 8] instead of an image of the production or its stars. Coward's plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture. [43] Coward, still having trouble finding producers, raised the money to produce the play himself. And youth pervaded the Savoy last night, applauding everything so boisterously that you felt, not without exhilaration, that you were in the midst of a 'rag'. Some saw the drugs as a mask for homosexuality;[41] Kenneth Tynan later described it as "a jeremiad against narcotics with dialogue that sounds today not so much stilted as high-heeled". [78] A revue, Sigh No More (1945), was a moderate success,[79] but two musicals, Pacific 1860 (1946), a lavish South Seas romance, and Ace of Clubs (1949), set in a night club, were financial failures. [92] In one of the three plays, A Song at Twilight, Coward abandoned his customary reticence on the subject and played an explicitly homosexual character. Its 1933 film adaptation won the Academy Award for best picture. [155] Chothia comments that a feature of Coward's plays of the 1920s and 30s is that, "unusually for the period, the women in Coward's plays are at least as self-assertive as the men, and as likely to seethe with desire or rage, so that courtship and the battle of the sexes is waged on strictly equal terms". [167] For his last and least successful musical, Coward reverted to Ruritanian royalty in The Girl Who Came to Supper (1963), which closed after 112 performances in New York and has never been staged in London. [44], Other Coward works produced in the mid-to-late 1920s included the plays Easy Virtue (1926), a drama about a divorcée's clash with her snobbish in-laws; The Queen Was in the Parlour, a Ruritanian romance; This Was a Man (1926), a comedy about adulterous aristocrats; The Marquise (1927), an eighteenth-century costume drama; Home Chat (1927), a comedy about a married woman's fidelity; and the revues On with the Dance (1925) and This Year of Grace (1928). [154], During the 1930s, once he was established by his early successes, Coward experimented with theatrical forms. The illustration captures how Coward's image had changed by the 1960s: he was no longer seen as the smooth 1930s sophisticate, but as the doyen of the theatre. Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".[1]. [100] Invited to direct Hay Fever with Edith Evans at the National Theatre, he wrote in 1964, "I am thrilled and flattered and frankly a little flabbergasted that the National Theatre should have had the curious perceptiveness to choose a very early play of mine and to give it a cast that could play the Albanian telephone directory. "[1], Coward's distinctive clipped diction arose from his childhood: his mother was deaf and Coward developed his staccato style of speaking to make it easier for her to hear what he was saying; it also helped him eradicate a slight lisp. Based on Coward's short play Still Life, Pretty Polly, UK/A Matter of Innocence, US (1967), Based on Coward’s short story Pretty Polly Barlow, Based on the life and career of Gertrude Lawrence. [56], In 1933 Coward wrote, directed and co-starred with the French singer Yvonne Printemps in both London and New York productions of an operetta, Conversation Piece (1933). There he was one morning, flipping verbal tiddlywinks with reporters about "Dad's Renaissance"; the next he was ... beside Forster, T. S. Eliot and the OMs, demonstrably the greatest living English playwright. He took endless trouble with me ... and taught me during those two short weeks many technical points of comedy acting which I use to this day. "[42] In praise of Coward's versatility, Lord Mountbatten said, in a tribute on Coward's seventieth birthday, "There are probably greater painters than Noël, greater novelists than Noël, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars. There appeared to be no earthly reason why Miss Lila Field shouldn't jump at me, and we both believed that she would be a fool indeed to miss such a magnificent opportunity. Others have interpreted Coward's strong female characters as evidence of misogyny. The story is about a nymphomaniac socialite and her cocaine-addicted son (played by Coward). Graham Payn also played a small role in the film. This seemed to dispose of all argument. I did everything that was expected of me. [5] Coward was bitten by the performing bug early and appeared in amateur concerts by the age of seven. In that capacity, he befriended the young Peter Collinson, who was in the care of the orphanage. "[135] In religion, Coward was agnostic. [74], In his Middle East Diary Coward made several statements that offended many Americans. [87] He directed the successful 1964 Broadway musical adaptation of Blithe Spirit, called High Spirits. Although he had little luck, he found the Broadway theatre stimulating. [138] The press and many book publishers failed to follow suit, and his name was printed as 'Noel' in The Times, The Observer and other contemporary newspapers and books. I had a very, very long part, but I was very, very bad at it". This was before his first major success as a playwright and actor, in The Vortex, written the following year and staged in 1924.

"[175], The playwright John Osborne said, "Mr Coward is his own invention and contribution to this century. His parents were Arthur Sabin Coward (1856–1937), a piano salesman, and Violet Agnes Coward (1863–1954), daughter of Henry Gordon Veitch, a captain and surveyor in the Royal Navy. The first of these, Together With Music, paired Coward with Mary Martin, featuring him in many of the numbers from his Las Vegas act. [35], In 1921, Coward made his first trip to America, hoping to interest producers there in his plays. Blithe Spirit book. [170] It was a moderate success with 213 performances in 1945–46.
[180] In another tribute, Tim Rice said of Coward's songs: "The wit and wisdom of Noël Coward's lyrics will be as lively and contemporary in 100 years' time as they are today",[134] and many have been recorded by Damon Albarn, Ian Bostridge, The Divine Comedy, Elton John, Valerie Masterson, Paul McCartney, Michael Nyman, Pet Shop Boys, Vic Reeves, Sting, Joan Sutherland, Robbie Williams and others. It was used of him from the 1920s onwards. After the Ball, his 1953 adaptation of Lady Windermere's Fan, was the last musical he premiered in the West End; his last two musicals were first produced on Broadway. [155][n 13], The best-known plays of Coward's middle period, the late 1930s and the 40s, Present Laughter, This Happy Breed and Blithe Spirit are more traditional in construction and less unconventional in content. [188] On stage, characters based on Coward have included Beverly Carlton in the 1939 Broadway play The Man Who Came to Dinner. Wilson used his position to steal from Coward, but the playwright was in love and accepted both the larceny and Wilson's heavy drinking. [31] Nevertheless, The Manchester Guardian thought that Coward got the best out of the role,[32] and The Times called the play "the jolliest thing in London". The former Albery Theatre (originally the New Theatre) in London was renamed the Noël Coward Theatre in his honour in 2006. His comic novel, Pomp and Circumstance (1960), about life in a tropical British colony, met with more critical success. Welcome to the official homepage of Noël Coward, one of the greatest British playwrights of all time. [149] His nickname, "The Master", "started as a joke and became true", according to Coward. [99] It began with a hit 1963 revival of Private Lives in London and then New York.



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