Shelagh Delaney
Shelagh Delaney [ ʃi ː lə dəleini ] ( born November 25, 1938 in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, † November 20, 2011 in Suffolk, East Anglia, England) was a British novelist and screenwriter who primarily through her play A Taste of Honey ( Original title A taste Of Honey ) was known.
Life
Shelagh Delaney, a British writer with Irish roots, was born in 1938 in Salford, Lancashire, where her most famous work, A Taste of Honey plays. When she was twelve years old, she first saw a play, a performance of Shakespeare's Othello laity, of which she was very impressed. After they had broken with 17 years of school, she worked as a shop assistant and receptionist.
As a 17- year-old she began working on A Taste of Honey, first, however, as a novel. Soon they noticed that the content in the form of a play would better accentuate and took two weeks off to rewrite it. The main character of the play is the girl Jo, who lives in an English slum of the working class with her irresponsible mother, Helen. The drama confronts the reader with a variety of social issues - unwed motherhood, racism and homosexuality - with an openness that was completely new to the England of 1950. It also portrays the life and behavior of typical northern English workers in an original way.
In 1958, the director Joan Littlewood at the plant was attentive and arranged a performance in London's East End. Shortly thereafter, it was also played in the West End, where it was successfully listed several years and won several awards. In 1960 there came to the stages of New York and won an award there. At the request of several directors Shelagh Delaney wrote the screenplay in 1961 for her play and was awarded a British Film Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The film, which bears the same name as the piece, turned Tony Richardson and made him the key film of the British New Wave of cinema. This Shelagh Delaney was at the age of 23 to one of the most famous writers of her time. For the film, Bobby Scott wrote later Evergreen A Taste of Honey, which was not mentioned in the novel.
Since then, their work showed a remarkable versatility. In 1960, her second play, The Lion in Love. In 1963 she published the short story collection Sweetly Sings the Donkey, and later several television dramas and award-winning screenplays such as Dance with a Stranger (1982).
Her works had ( above all Taste of Honey ) integrated a great influence on Morrissey, the lead singer of the indie band The Smiths, the quotations from their works over and over again in his lyrics. In addition, you can see the writer on the cover of the Smiths album Louder Than Bombs and the single Girlfriend in a Coma.
2006 saw Peter Zadek again the play A Taste of Honey for the German theater and staged it at the St. Pauli Theater in Hamburg with Julia Jentsch and Eva Mattes in the lead roles.
Shelagh Delaney died a few days before her 73rd birthday of complications from cancer and heart failure. She left her daughter Charlotte and three grandchildren.
Works
- A Taste Of Honey, 1958
- The Lion in Love 1960
- Sweetly Sings the Donkey, 1963, German vodka and small pieces of gold, 1966