John Osborne, 1981 (photo)

John Osborne (1929 – 1994) Influential, prolific English playwright, screenwriter and actor. The success of his best-known play, Look Back in Anger (1956), transformed English theatre. He was the best known of the group labelled the 'kitchen sink' playwrights, whose work represented a reaction against the drawing room comedies and middle class plays of the earlier 20th century. He was also part of the 'Angry Young Men' movement, so called because of their anger at the English establishment and the class system. In later years his anger turned to nostalgia for the England which he himself had done so much to alter. Other well known plays include The Entertainer (1957) and Inadmissible Evidence (1964).