Biography
Terence Rattigan was that relative rarity among the ranks of playwrights: a major theater author who was almost equally successful as a screenwriter, and one of a very few playwrights of his era privileged to adapt his own stage work to the screen on a regular basis. Born in London in 1911, the son of Frank Rattigan, a career diplomat, Terence Rattigan was of upper-class Irish descent on both sides, with renowned scholarly and intellectual achievements on the part of both his mother's and his father's ancestors. Though his parents came from socially and professionally prominent backgrounds, they were not wealthy, and they depended upon the living provided by his father's service in the diplomatic corps. Alas, as Frank Rattigan's mercurial personality gradually became more unpredictable -- and eventually cost him his career and his marriage -- Terence faced an uncertain future. The elder Rattigan hoped for some sort of redemption of his own standing by having his son enter the diplomatic service, but from the time he was a boy, Terence Rattigan was increasingly drawn to plays and the theater, often at the expense of his other studies. Like his father, Rattigan was something of an iconoclast. He rebelled as a student at Harrow in the late '20s, circulating books by the Huxleys and other banned writers and publicly opposing compulsory military drilling. Raised amid the tragedy and disillusionment of World War I and its aftermath, he became a dedicated pacifist, and entered Oxford at a time of great ferment, as a new generation of students came to challenge the traditions and accepted wisdom of the prior generations. Ostensibly there as a history student, Rattigan spent most of his time writing plays and helping to organize anti-war activity among the students, who were a very impressive lot. His classmates included
Peter Glenville, novelist Angus Wilson, and screenwriter
Paul Dehn, among many other notables. Rattigan resisted his family's efforts to groom him for the diplomatic service -- including sending him to a crash course in French one summer -- keeping the theater as his goal.
In 1933, at the close of his undergraduate days, he used his experience of Oxford to co-write a play entitled First Episode, and paid the equivalent of 1,200 dollars to get it produced at an experimental theater in London. The piece was daring, fast-paced, and funny, as well as somewhat naïve and amateurish, but it was good enough to attract the attention of a producer who was willing to mount it at a theater in London's West End. First Episode got mixed reviews, but did run for nearly four months in 1934; it didn't earn Rattigan any money, but did give him a measure of theatrical success immediately out of college, which was enough to convince his previously skeptical father that his son had a talent worth encouraging. Alas, Rattigan was unable to repeat even the limited success of his debut work. A professional link-up with his friend
John Gielgud in a production ofA Tale of Two Cities was canceled, and five successive original plays of his were failures.
In early 1936, increasingly concerned about his future and income, Rattigan accepted an invitation to join Warner Bros.' British studio at Teddington, which specialized -- as did most British divisions of American studios in those days -- in grinding out ultra-low-budget "quota quickies," very threadbare B-movies produced in England exclusively for distribution domestically under the Film Quota Act, which required that a certain number of British-made movies be shown in British theaters. Rattigan, however, proved unsuccessful in his attempts at creating the kinds of scripts that were needed, though he did learn the basics of screenwriting while he was there. Finally, later in 1936, he found success with French Without Tears, directed by a former actor named
Harold French. Inspired by Rattigan's summer of 1931, when he tried to cram the French language at the behest of his father, the play delighted audiences and critics alike, and became a huge hit in London's West End, running for 1,039 performances (extraordinary for a time when 250 was considered a serious hit), though it closed after only 111 shows in New York. Rattigan was suddenly a successful playwright, welcomed into the profession to which he'd aspired and the world he'd sought.
Even as his play was in the midst of its run, Rattigan hit another trough for the next three years, enduring a new string of failures. Indeed, the only real professional breakthrough that he saw at the end of the decade came when the film rights to French Without Tears were sold to producer
Filippo del Guidice's Two Cities Films. Paramount Pictures became a partner to Two Cities in the production and insisted upon casting
Ray Milland and
Ellen Drew in the film, a decision which made no one who knew the play (including Rattigan) very happy. Meanwhile, Two Cities gave the directorial assignment to
Anthony Asquith, then coming off of his immense success with the film
Pygmalion, and the screenplay adaptation to Russian expatriate
Anatole de Grunwald. Eventually, Rattigan himself was brought in to help, for a very welcomed (and badly needed) additional fee. To his pleasure, he found that he liked working with de Grunwald and Asquith. He also discovered that, in dealing with his own work, at least, he had more than enough skill as a screenwriter to join that profession. To top it off, the resulting film was a success, despite its bad fortune to be released just as the Second World War broke out in Europe.
With the outbreak of the war, Rattigan initially went to work for the Foreign Office, but later served in combat as a gunner on Atlantic U-boat patrols. He continued to write regularly, enduring a string of stage failures until 1942, when his topical drama Flare Path, based on his combat service, won the favor of critics and audiences and enjoyed a nearly two-year run. The play was also produced for a short run in New York in a production starring
Alec Guinness. Finally, in 1943, Rattigan became the first English playwright in history to author two plays with more than 1,000 performances in their first productions when his comedy While the Sun Shines (which Asquith also directed for the stage) began a 1,154-performance run in London. He had yet to conquer the New York stage, however, where none of his plays were successful. That changed in early 1946, when O Mistress Mine, a retitled version of his Love in Idleness, came to Broadway in a production by
Alfred Lunt and
Lynn Fontanne; it ran for 452 performances despite mixed reviews. In 1947, Rattigan finally broke through the wall of negative criticism that had dogged even that success in America with his drama The Winslow Boy.
Meanwhile, amid all of his theatrical activities, Rattigan was also establishing himself in movies. He, Asquith, and de Grunwald started a 25-year professional relationship that mostly went from success to success. Although Rattigan also found a sympathetic directorial personality in
Harold French -- and both French and Asquith directed his works for the stage in the '40s -- it was the combination of Rattigan's plays and Asquith's direction, with de Grunwald serving as producer, that led to an enviable body of screen work, starting in 1941 with
Quiet Wedding. Their best films together included
The Way to the Stars (1945),
While the Sun Shines (1947),
The Winslow Boy (1949),
The Browning Version (1951, arguably the finest adaptation of a modern play done in England up to that time),
The Final Test (1953), The V.I.P.s (1963), and
The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964). All were notable movies and successful collaborations; and on each of them, Rattigan was responsible for adapting the original play. Rattigan also wrote or co-wrote original screenplays for movies and television, earning an Oscar nomination for The Sound Barrier (1952), one of the finest aeronautical thrillers of the postwar era. The latter was initiated by director
David Lean and offered to Rattigan as a project, but the playwright was initially doubtful until the producer,
Alexander Korda, had him meet a group of modern test pilots; he'd known combat pilots during World War II from his military service, but he found these men's quiet dedication most intriguing. In author Geoffrey Wansell's biography of the playwright, he cited Rattigan's fascination with the pilots' low-keyed personal qualities, so different from those of their wartime predecessors, as the springboard for this most successful film script.
Rattigan's finest and most enduring work for the screen was probably
The Browning Version, which had its roots in his time as a boy at Harrow in the mid-'20s, drawing on his memories of one cold, distant, dry-as-dust teacher of classical languages, and of another teacher to whom he was attracted romantically. Rattigan had the misfortune to come of age as a gay man in the England of the 1930s, when such matters were still criminalized and prosecuted; he had the good fortune, however, to be a man of the theater, the one respectable area of creative life that tolerated such relationships. He often dealt with his homosexuality by veiling it in his works; indeed, even First Episode, which was heavily censored for the stage, shocked people with its suggestions of homoerotic attractions among Oxford students. Rattigan would have his heroes involved in heterosexual relationships in his other works, but often featured an unspoken bond and loyalty among men that stood in for his real meanings; additionally, he often displayed a deeply skeptical and dark view of heterosexual marriage. It worked in getting the plays produced, and also in helped him write some dazzlingly complex and intense scripts. In The Browning Version, both as a play and film, there is no suggestion of homosexual attraction between the male characters, though there is a notion running through it that men can be truer, more loyal, and kind to each other and, in their way, more faithful and reliable than the women around them, even a spouse. (The work has among its characters the most vicious female spouse this side of Lady Macbeth.) Ironically, when
Mike Figgis remade the film in the much freer '90s, he wrung from his movie most of that veiled bond between the male characters -- what's more, bizarrely, Rattigan's play was credited as the source, when it was actually his screenplay that was the basis for the newer film.
As Asquith's health declined and his output slackened in the late '50s, Rattigan saw his work come to the screen in fine form from other filmmakers, including
Harold French, to whom he remained personally close until the end of his life, and
Delbert Mann, who made a brilliant version of
Separate Tables in 1958 starring
Burt Lancaster from a screenplay co-authored by the playwright (who won an award from the New York Film Critics Circle). Somewhat less successfully (a result of creative differences between the two leads), Rattigan saw his play The Sleeping Prince come to the screen as
The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957 starring
Laurence Olivier (who also directed) and
Marilyn Monroe (who also produced). In 1958, he was awarded the rank of CBE (Commander of the British Empire), and he was granted a knighthood in 1971. Rattigan remained a popular playwright into the '60s, and continued to write for the screen, including the 1969 remake Goodbye, Mr. Chips and the 1973 feature
The Nelson Affair from his own play. His final play, Cause Celebre, in which he explored the homosexual relationships of his youth, opened in London in 1977 and had a run of 282 performances. Rattigan died during the run of the production. In a sign of the changes that had taken place in the world during his lifetime, a decade after his death, that play -- which would have scandalized the theater world in the '30s -- was brought to television. Also since his death, Rattigan's plays, including The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, and Separate Tables, have been revived on-stage and remade for the screen, usually very respectfully, if not always with great inspiration. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide