About Terence Rattigan

Sir Terence Rattigan CBE

10 June 1911 – 30 November 1977

Rattigan enjoyed his first success in 1933 while at Oxford, when First Episode was produced in London. Emboldened, he left Oxford and over the next two years wrote six plays, but none was produced.

His fortunes changed dramatically in November 1936 when French Without Tears was an unexpected smash hit, turning its author and little known cast – including Rex Harrison, Roland Culver and Trevor Howard – into stars.

During the next six years he completed only one full-length play, After the Dance, which received good reviews but, owing to the outbreak of World War Two, closed after just sixty performances.

Rattigan joined the RAF as an Air Gunner with Coastal Command. This experience sparked the most successful and productive period of his career, with ten plays in just twelve years, including Flare Path (1942), While the Sun Shines (1943), The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and Separate Tables (1954), plus screenplays for more than a dozen films.

However, the arrival of a new generation of actors and writers in the 1950s made Rattigan appear old-fashioned. No longer a favourite with the critics, he seemed to lose heart and devoted much of the rest of his life to writing highly paid film scripts. Nevertheless, this final period of his career produced three of his finest plays – Man and Boy (1963), In Praise of Love (1973) and Cause Célèbre (1977).

Rattigan’s plays, the themes they explore, and his characters’ struggles to cope with painful emotional and moral challenges remain as relevant, and his comedy as effective, as ever.