Terence
Rattigan was gay, with numerous lovers but no long-term partners. It
has been claimed that his work is essentially autobiographical,
containing coded references to his sexuality, which he kept secret from
all but his closest friends.

This
is the fifty-first post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Sir
Terence Mervyn Rattigan CBE (10 June 1911 – 30 November 1977) was one
of England's most popular 20th century dramatists. His plays are
generally situated within an upper-middle-class background.He is known
for such works as The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version and Separate
Tables, among many others. He was also a screenwriter, mainly of his own
plays.

Early life
Terence
Rattigan was born in 1911 in South Kensington,[2] London of Irish
Protestant extraction.[3] He had an elder brother, Brian. They were the
grandsons of Sir William Henry Rattigan, a notable Indian-based jurist,
and later a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament for North East
Lanarkshire. His father was Frank Rattigan CMG, a diplomat whose
exploits included an affair with Princess Elisabeth of Romania (future
consort of King George II of Greece) which resulted in her having an
abortion.[1]
Rattigan's birth certificate and his birth announcement
in The Times both state he was born on 9 June 1911. However, most
reference books state that he was born on 10 June, and Rattigan himself
never publicly disputed this date. There is evidence suggesting that the
date on the birth certificate is incorrect.[4] He was given no middle
name, but he adopted the middle name "Mervyn" in early adulthood.

Life and career
Success
as a playwright came early, with the comedy French Without Tears in
1936, set in a crammer. Rattigan's determination to write a more serious
play produced After the Dance (1939), a satirical social drama about
the "bright young things" and their failure to politically engage. The
outbreak of the Second World War scuppered any chances of a long run.
After the war, Rattigan alternated between comedies and dramas,
establishing himself as a major playwright: the most famous of which
were The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue
Sea (1952), and Separate Tables (1954).
Rattigan believed in
understated emotions, and craftsmanship, which after the overnight
success of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 was deemed old
fashioned. Rattigan responded to his critical disfavour with some
bitterness. Some churlish interviews served only to confirm the view
that he had no sympathy or understanding of the modern world. His plays
Ross, Man and Boy, In Praise of Love, and Cause Célèbre, however show no
sign of any decline in his talent.

He was diagnosed as having leukaemia in
1962 and recovered two years later, but fell ill again in 1968. He
disliked the so-called Swinging London of the 1960s and moved abroad,
living in Bermuda, where he lived off the proceeds from lucrative
screenplays including The V.I.P.s and The Yellow Rolls-Royce. For a time
he was the highest-paid screenwriter in the world.
He was knighted
in the Queen's Birthday Honours of June 1971 for services to the
theatre, being only the fourth playwright to be knighted in the 20th
century (after Sir William Schwenk Gilbert in 1907, Sir Arthur Wing
Pinero in 1909 and Sir Noël Coward in 1970). He had been appointed a
Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in June 1958. He
moved back to Britain, where he experienced a minor revival in his
reputation before his death. He died in Hamilton, Bermuda from bone
cancer in 1977 at the age of 66.

Fifteen
years after his death, largely through a revival of The Deep Blue Sea,
at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Karel Reisz, Rattigan has
increasingly been seen as one of the century's finest playwrights, an
expert choreographer of emotion, and an anatomist of human emotional
pain. A string of successful revivals followed, including The Winslow
Boy at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2001 (with David Rintoul, and
subsequently on tour in 2002 with Edward Fox), Man and Boy at the
Duchess Theatre, London, in 2005, with David Suchet as Gregor Antonescu,
and In Praise of Love at Chichester, and Separate Tables at the Royal
Exchange, Manchester, in 2006. His play on the last days of Lord Nelson,
A Bequest to the Nation, was revived on Radio 4 for Trafalgar 200,
starring Janet McTeer as Lady Hamilton, Kenneth Branagh as Nelson, and
Amanda Root as Lady Nelson. Thea Sharrock directed his rarely-seen After
the Dance in the summer of 2010 at London's Royal National Theatre.
Sharrock will also direct a major new production of Rattigan's final and
also rarely seen play Cause Célèbre at The Old Vic in March 2011 as
part of The Terence Rattigan Centenery year celebrations.

Stage plays
1934 First Episode
1935
A Tale of Two Cities (an adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel, written
with John Gielgud; it was not produced, but appeared in 1950 as a radio
play)
1936 French Without Tears
1939 After the Dance
1940 Follow My Leader
1940 Grey Farm
1942 Flare Path
1943 While the Sun Shines
1944 Love in Idleness (played in U.S. as O Mistress Mine)
1946 The Winslow Boy
1948 Harlequinade
1948 The Browning Version
1948 Playbill    1949 Adventure Story
1950 Who is Sylvia? (filmed as The Man Who Loved Redheads)
1952 The Deep Blue Sea
1953 The Sleeping Prince (filmed as The Prince and the Showgirl)
1954 Separate Tables
1958 Variation on a Theme
1960 Ross
1960 Joie de Vivre, a musical version of French Without Tears, with music by Robert Stolz and song lyrics by Paul Dehn
1963 Man and Boy
1970 A Bequest to the Nation
1973 In Praise of Love
1976 Duologue
1977 Cause Célèbre

Television plays
1951 The Final Test (TV: 1951; film: 1953)
1962 Heart to Heart
1964 Ninety Years On
1966 Nelson - A Portrait in Miniature
1968 All On Her Own
1972 High Summer

Film
Filmed plays
A number of Rattigan's plays have been filmed (he was the screenwriter or co-writer for all those made in his lifetime):
French
Without Tears (1940; Anatole de Grunwald and Ian Dalrymple were
credited as screenwriters, although Rattigan also played a major role)
While the Sun Shines (1947; with de Grunwald)
The Winslow Boy (1948 and 1999)
The Browning Version (film: 1951 and 1994; TV: 1955 and 1985)
The Final Test (1953; based on his 1951 television play)
The Man Who Loved Redheads (1954; based on Who Is Sylvia?)
The Deep Blue Sea (1955)
The Prince and the Showgirl (1957; based on The Sleeping Prince)
Separate
Tables (1958; Rattigan and co-writer John Gay were nominated for an
Academy Award for screenwriting; David Niven won the Best Actor Oscar
and Wendy Hiller won Best Supporting Actress)
A Bequest to the Nation (1973)
Cause Célèbre (1987; TV)
Original screenplays
Terence Rattigan also wrote or co-wrote the following original screenplays:
English Without Tears (1944; with Anatole de Grunwald; U.S. title Her Man Gilbey)
Journey Together (1945)
Bond Street (1948; uncredited; with de Grunwald and Rodney Ackland)
The Sound Barrier (1952; U.S. title Breaking the Sound Barrier; Rattigan's first Academy Award nomination)
The V.I.P.s (1963; Margaret Rutherford won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her performance)
The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964)
Other screenwriting
Rattigan wrote or co-wrote the following screenplays from existing material by other writers:
Quiet Wedding (1940; with Anatole de Grunwald; based on the play by Esther McCracken)
The Day Will Dawn (1942; with de Grunwald; U.S. title The Avengers; based on a treatment by Patrick Kirwan)
Uncensored (1942; with Rodney Ackland; based on the book by Oscar Millard adapted by Wolfgang Wilhelm)
The Way to the Stars (1945; from a story written by Rattigan, de Grunwald and Richard Sherman; U.S. title Johnny in the Clouds)
Brighton Rock (1947; with Graham Greene, from Greene's novel)
Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969; based on the novel by James Hilton)