Born June 10: Terrence Rattigan

After the full-blown success at twenty-five of his first solo play, the light-hearted French Without Tears (1936), Terrence Rattigan wanted to write a more serious work. He created the satirical drama After the Dance (1939), attacking the apolitical generation of Bright Young Things for their failure to stop another war. For the prolific Rattigan, success followed success, among them: The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, and Separate Tables, all of which became popular movies. He was twice nominated for both a BAFTA and an Oscar. Yet just as he had earlier attacked the older generation, now in 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger exploded all the hallmarks of the Rattigan generation: the staid, repressed, older and old-fashioned characters who never paraded their emotions. Overnight, Rattigan was deeply out of favor with the critics who had adored him, and the timing could not have been worse. In 1957 he wrote his first play that directly addressed his homosexuality, Variation on a Theme, and it was panned. Rattigan's father had been a career diplomat whose habitual dalliances eventually got him fired by the Home Office. Not surprisingly, Rattigan learned to keep his own relationships well hidden, perhaps to the point of being emotionally cut off even from his partners. Completely out of step with London's mod, Swinging Sixties, he decamped for Bermuda. There, he wrote for Hollywood and for a time was the world's highest paid screenwriter. His first bout of leukemia in 1962 went into remission two years later, only to recur in 1968. He died of cancer in 1977 still in Bermuda.