Actors & Actresses - Biography, British Playwrights - Literary Biography, Theater Biography - Playwrights

My Life with Noel Coward

Name: My Life with Noel Coward
Author: Graham Payn
ISBN: 9781557831903

by Graham Payn, Barry Day

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Overview

(Applause Books). This is the definitive memoir of the private Noel Coward by the only man with the compassionate insight and first-hand experience to write it. Graham Payn, star of many of Coward's shows, shared the Master's professional and private life for thirty years. When Coward kept the rest of the world at bay, Payn remained at his side as confidant and friend. No one else was as privy to Coward's doubts and dreams.

Synopsis

This is the definitive memoir of the private Noel Coward by the only man with the compassionate insight and first-hand experience to write it. Graham Payn, star of many of Coward's shows, shared the Master's professional and private life for thirty years. When Coward kept the rest of the world at bay, Payn remained at his side as confidant and friend. No one else was as privy to Coward's doubts and dreams.

Booknews

Graham Payn, a close friend of Coward's for some 30 years, writes a loving, engagingly gossipy portrait of Coward's life, career, and numerous fascinating friends. Liberally interspersed with excerpts from Coward's work and personal diaries, including previously unpublished theater writings, it also contains many fine b&w photographs. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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Editorials

Booknews

Jack Helbig

While he was alive, Noel Coward the urbane public wit often overshadowed Coward the accomplished writer who was responsible for such twentieth-century masterpieces as "Private Lives", "Hay Fever", and "Blithe Spirit". Happily, art, like murder, will out. In the 21 years since his death, Coward's reputation as a playwright has grown. Payn's loving, immensely likable memoir of his longtime friend will not change public perceptions of Coward. It contains no dirt about the man or his unofficial family. The readable, sometimes digressive remembrance does, however, provide an interesting, often tartly witty portrait of Coward during the most difficult years of his life, the period just after World War II when his work and "Cowardy" style was suddenly unfashionable. Students of theater will find especially fascinating the master's previously unpublished essays with which Payn concludes the book; they include Coward's famous series of blistering (London) "Sunday Times" articles attacking the fashionable "experimental work" of the post-World War II British playwrights.