John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man
by John Heilpern
Published by Vintage Books
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Reviewed by Andrea Stuckey
The most striking characteristic of British playwright, John Osbourne, is his fickle emotional well-being. At least, that’s the way biographer John Heilpern described him in a roundabout way. The famous actor-turned-playwright, Oscar winner, and prime pivotal subject in British theater, lead a life more colorful than any play ever written.
As a child, Osbourne was already causing trouble as he was expelled from school at age 15 for hitting the headmaster–five years after his father had died of tuberculosis. Osbourne was known to throw fits of anger and depression, and never healed from his father’s devastating death. He was left with a mother who put food on the table by working as a barmaid.
In his earliest years, Osbourne had become attracted to theater (where he could camouflage his lower-class roots) and toured for a short time as an actor. During this time he wrote four full-length plays and married the first of five wives. His first divorce gave him the material for his best-known script, Look Back in Anger, which held an intense undertone of class hatred. British theater critics were stunned to learn Osbourne was British, as they had assumed by his scripts that he was American.
The biography continues with the story of Osbourne’s estranged daughter, his other four wives, and his downfall with drugs and alcohol, which ended his life on Christmas Eve, 1994, where he confessed his last written words, “I have sinned.”
Heilpern, a New York Observer drama critic, writes a fascinating and sympathetic biography, one where Osbourne was portrayed as a charming, sweet man that collected teddy bears, but also the emotionally tormented man who threw his teenage daughter out and never spoke to her again.
This is a biography that reads like a novel, taking on different narrators, though Heilpern is the moderating narrator overall, sharing Osbourne’s secret journal entries (Heilpern was given full access to Osbourne’s journals), interviews he conducted with people Osbourne associated with, tying it all neatly together into a colorfully entertaining biography.
Armchair Interviews says: If you like to read about successful people who rose above their dysfunctions, this is an outstanding read.