The Browning Version | Terence Rattigan Biography
Terence Rattigan was born on June 10, 1911, in London, England. His father, William, was a career diplomat, and served in countries such as Turkey and Romania. While his parents lived abroad, Terence and his brother were raised by their grandparents in England. Rattigan was about eleven years old when his parents returned. By that time, he had fallen in love with reading and going to plays. He wrote his first play about the age of ten.
Rattigan was educated at the Harrow School from 1925 until 1930, when he entered Trinity College, Oxford. His experiences at the former, a public school, informed such plays as The Browning Version. Although Rattigan was training for the diplomatic core, by the time he reached Oxford, his interest was focused on the stage.
His first play, First Episode (1933) was written with Philip Heimann while still attending Oxford. It was a complete failure. Yet this did not deter Rattigan from leaving school and moving to London to become a professional playwright.
He achieved early success with his comedic play French without Tears (1934), which did extraordinarily well in London and in several other countries. At the time, the play held the record for the longest-running play in England. It was based on Rattigan’s experiences studying French. His next few plays were much less successful, both at home and in New York.
While Rattigan served in the Royal Air Force during World War II he continued to write plays, producing about one a year until the early 1960s. His Flare Path (1942), a war-themed romantic drama, was well-received in London. Rattigan also began a career writing screenplays with A Quiet Wedding (1940). Although his plays were popular with critics and audiences in London, critical acclaim in the United States continued to elude him.
This changed with Rattigan’s next two works. The Winslow Boy (1946), which concerned the Archer-Shee case in Great Britain, was lauded on both sides of the Atlantic and received several prestigious awards. His reputation as a serious dramatist was cemented with The Browning Version (1948), which received a similar critical response.
After 1948 Rattigan’s plays garnered mixed critical and commercial success. Such plays as The Deep Blue Sea (1952) about a woman’s obsessive love for an unworthy man were not well-received.
One of Rattigan’s last big successes was Separate Tables (1954), which concerns people’s loneliness and isolation. By the early 1960s, Rattigan stopped writing for the stage when his ideas about the theater were criticized for being old-fashioned. He focused on writing screenplays and traveling for several years; but he returned to writing for the stage in his final years. His last produced play was Cause Celebre (1977), based on the trial of Alama Rattenbury in 1930s England. Rattigan died of bone cancer on November 30, 1977.
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