Alan Bennett (born May 9, 1934) is a British playwright, screenwriter, actor and writer. He was born in Leeds and studied at the University of Oxford where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at university for several years. His collaborations as writers and performers with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the revitalization of Beyond the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival of 1960 brought instant fame. He gave up academics, and turned to write full-time, his first stage drama Forty Years On produced in 1968.
His work included The Madness of George III and his film adaptation, the monologue series of Talking Heads, the next play and film of The History Boys, and popular audio books , including his reading on Alice's Adventures in the Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh .
Video Alan Bennett
Kehidupan awal
Bennett was born at Armley in Leeds. The youngest son of a co-op hunter, Walter, and his wife Lilian Mary (nà © Å © e Peel), Bennett attended Christ Church, Upper Armley, Church of England School (in the same class as Barbara Taylor Bradford), and then the Leeds School Modern (now Lawnswood School).
He studied Russian at the Joint Service School for Linguists during his national service before applying for a scholarship at Oxford University. He was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a first class degree in history. While in Oxford he did a comedy with a number of actors who finally succeeded at Oxford Revue. He remained at the university for several years, where he researched and taught Medieval History, before deciding he was not fit to be an academic.
Maps Alan Bennett
Careers
In August 1960, Bennett, along with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Peter Cook, achieved instant fame by performing at the Edinburgh Festival in the revitalization of satire [Beyond the Fringe]. After the festival, the show continued in London and New York. He also appeared on My Father Knew Lloyd George. His TV comedy sketch series On the Margin (1966) was unfortunately removed; BBC re-use expensive videotapes instead of storing them in the archive. However, in 2014 it was announced that copies of the entire series had been found.
Around this time Bennett often finds himself playing as a vicar and claims that as a teenager he thinks he will grow up to become an English Church pastor, for no better reason than that he looks like a minister.
The first stage of Bennett Forty Years, directed by Patrick Garland, was produced in 1968. Many television, stage and radio dramas followed, with scenarios, short stories, novels, a large collection of non-fictional prose, and broadcasting and many performances as actors.
Bennett's distinctive, expressive, humorous and sharp human voice from his writing has made his work very popular, especially autobiographical writings.
Many of Bennett's characters are very unfortunate and oppressed. Life has taken them to a dead end or through them. In many cases they have encountered disappointment in the areas of sex and intimate relationships, mostly through tentativeness and failure to connect with others.
Despite the long history with both the National Theater and the BBC - Bennett never wrote about the commission, stating "I do not work on commissions, I only do it on spec. If people do not want it then it's too bad."
Bennett is equally unafraid and merciful in weakening his character's weakness. This can be seen in his television drama for LWT from the early 1970s to his work for the BBC in the early 1980s. Many of his works for television included his first drama for the media, A Day Out in 1972, A Little Outing in 1977, Intensive Care at 1982, English Foreigners in 1983 and Attribution Questions in 1991. But perhaps his most famous screen job is the 1987 series Talking Heads > a monologue for television that was later performed at the Comedy Theater in London in 1992. This is a collection of sharp comic strips, each depicting several stages in the decline of characters from the initial state of rejection or ignorance of their predicament, through the slow realization of despair their situation, advanced to a gloomy or ambiguous conclusion. The second set of six Talking Heads followed a decade later, which was darker and more disturbing.
In the 2005 prose collection Bennett has written frankly and touched the mental illness suffered by his mother and other family members. Much of his work refers to the background of Leeds and while he is celebrated for his acute observation of certain types of northern speech ("It takes more than a Milk Box to throw away memories of Pearl Harbor"), his reach and courage. work is often undervalued. His TV drama The Old Crowd included a director's shooting and technical crew.
She wrote The Lady in the Van based on her experience with an eccentric woman named Miss Shepherd, who lived in Bennett's driveway in a series of dilapidated vans for over fifteen years. It was first published in 1989 as an essay in the London Review of Books. In 1990 he published it in book form. In 1999 he adapted it to a stage play, starring Maggie Smith and directed by Nicholas Hytner. The stage drama includes two characters named Alan Bennett. On February 21, 2009 it was broadcast as a radio drama on BBC Radio 4, with Maggie Smith repeating his role and Alan Bennett playing alone. He re-adapted the story for the movie in 2015, with Maggie Smith reiterating his role, and Nicholas Hytner directed again. In the film Alex Jennings plays two versions of Bennett, though Alan Bennett comes across as a cameo at the end of the film.
Bennett adapted his 1991 drama The Madness of George III for cinema. Titled The Madness of King George (1994), the film received four Academy Award nominations: for the writings of Bennett and the performances of Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. It won the award for best art direction.
Bennett's critically acclaimed The History Boys won three Laurence Olivier Awards in 2005, for Best New Play, Best Actor (Richard Griffiths), and Best Direction (Nicholas Hytner), having previously won the Critics' Circle Theater Awards and Evening Standard Awards for Best Actor and Best Play. Bennett also received the Laurence Olivier Award for Extraordinary Contributions to the British Theater. The History Boys won six Tony Awards on Broadway, including best play, best performance by prominent actor in a drama (Richard Griffiths), best performance by a lead actress in a drama (Frances de la Tour) and the best direction of a drama (Nicholas Hytner). The film version The History Boys was released in the UK in October 2006.
Bennett wrote the drama Enjoy in 1980. It was one of the rare epithets of his career and barely spent seven weeks at the Vaudeville Theater, apart from star players Joan Plowright, Colin Blakely, Susan Littler, Philip Sayer, Liz Smith (who replaced Joan Hickson during practice) and, in his first West End role, Marc Sinden. It was directed by Ronald Eyre. The new production of Enjoy attracted a very favorable notification during the UK tour of 2008 and moved to West End of London in January 2009. The West End show took over Ã, Â £ 1 million in previous ticket sales and even extended the run to solve the request. The production stars Alison Steadman, David Troughton, Richard Glaves, Carol Macready and Josie Walker.
At the National Theater in late 2009 Nicholas Hytner directed the game Bennett The Habit of Art about the relationship between the poet W. H. Auden and composer Benjamin Britten.
The game Bennett People opened at the National Theater in October 2012.
Personal life
Bennett lives in Camden Town in London, with his colleague Rupert Thomas, editor of the World of Interiors magazine. Bennett also has a long-term relationship with his former housekeeper, Anne Davies, until his death in 2009.
Bennett was a disobedient Anglican; raised in the Church, he became very religious as a teenager, but "slowly left him [the Church] for many years", though he still holds faith, and often supports the restoration of church throughout England.
In 1988, Bennett rejected the award of the British Order Commander and in 1996 dismissed a knight.
In September 2005, Bennett revealed that, in 1997, he had undergone treatment for colorectal cancer, and described the disease as "boring". The chance for survival was given as "far less" than 50% and the surgeon had told him that they had thrown out a "rocky stone" tumor. He started Untold Stories (published 2005) thinking it would be published posthumously, but his cancer was in remission. In an autobiographical sketch that makes up the bulk of the book, Bennett wrote openly for the first time about his homosexuality. Bennett had previously referred to questions about his sexuality as asking a man who had just crawled across the Sahara desert to choose between Perrier or Malvern mineral water.
In October 2008, Bennett announced that he donated an entire archive of working papers, unpublished manuscripts, diaries and books to the Bodleian Library, stating that it was his gratitude to pay off the debt he felt as a debt to the British welfare state have given him an educational opportunity that his humble family background will never be given.
Bennett became Honorary Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1987. He was also awarded a D.Litt degree by the University of Leeds in 1990 and an honorary doctorate from Kingston University in 1996. In 1998 he rejected an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. , in protest at the receipt of funding for seats from press baron Rupert Murdoch. He also rejected CBE in 1988 and his knighthood in 1996. He has stated that, although he is not a republic, he would never want to be a knight, saying it would be a bit like having to wear a suit for the rest of life. Bennett earned Honorary Membership from The Coterie in the 2007 membership list.
In December 2011 Bennett returned to Lawnswood School, nearly 60 years after he left, to unveil the renamed Alan Bennett Library. He said he was "loose" based on The History Boys on his experience at school and his confession to Oxford. Lawnswood School dedicates its library to the author after he emerged as a vocal campaigner against public library cuts. The plan to close the local library was "wrong and very short-sighted", Bennett said, adding: "We impoverish young people."
References
Further reading
- Peter Wolfe, Understanding Alan Bennett , University of South Carolina Press, ISBNÃ, 1-57003-280-7
- Alexander Games (2001). Backing Into The Limelight: Biography of Alan Bennett . Title ISBN 0-7472-7030-9.
- Joseph H. O'Mealy, Alan Bennett: Critical Introduction , Routledge, 2001, ISBNÃ, 0-8153-3540-7
- Kara McKechnie, Alan Bennett, The Television Series, Manchester University Press, 2007. ISBNÃ, 978-0-7190-6806-5
- Robert Hewison, Foot Lamp - A Hundred Years of Cambridge Comedy , Methuen, 1983
- Roger Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus - Celebrating the Unique Comedy Generation 1960-1980 , Eyre Methuen, 1980, ISBN 978-0-413-46950-2
External links
- Profile in British Council
- BBC Archive Interview December 6, 2009 with Mark Lawson. (Video, 1 hour)
- BBC Interview Interview 4 Front Row . (Audio, 1 hour)
- Portrait in Portrait Gallery (3 pages)
- Alan Bennett on IMDb
- "The curtain reopens at Bennett play" BBC News, January 29, 2009 - Video interview with Alan Bennett
- Alan Bennett on the Screenonline of the British Film Institute
- Guardian profile "Birthday boy" May 7, 2009 by Blake Morrison.
- Alan Bennett on Macmillan Books
- BBC Radio 4's Alan Bennett's Talking Head "The Reunion". (Audio, 42 min)
- Filing material at Leeds University Library
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments