Noel Coward

16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973.

Noel Coward was a British director, 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 musical 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 in 1924. His plays are characterized by their wittiness and the unsemtementalized representation of emotional affairs.

While he started out by writing critical plays his attitude later changed and he wrote mostly melodramatic works about love triangles and ever-changing love affairs. He showed a side of the bohemian lifestyle by using a public scandal for his own fame and by associating himself with cocktails and witty performances. Although he was homosexual this is never explicitly mentioned in his plays or by himself, as 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." [1] 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 presented in honour of Coward and his works.

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

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

--Manu1988 14:28, 14 January 2012 (UTC)