Shelagh Delaney

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Delaney was featured twice on Smiths record sleeves. This is the sleeve for their 1987 single, "Girlfriend in a Coma".

Shelagh Delaney is a British playwright of Irish descent. She is best known for her play A Taste Of Honey.

Biography

Shelagh Delaney was born on November 25, 1939, in Salford, Lancashire, England, to Irish parents. It was at Broughton School that she saw her first play an amateur performance of Shakespeare's Othello. She was twelve at the time and the play made a great impression on her.

Delaney's formal education was patchy: she attended three primary schools, apparently enjoying the change from one to another; after failing the eleven-plus examination to qualify for grammar school, she moved on to Broughton Secondary School. However, she proved a late developer and finally transferred to the local grammar school, where she had a record of fair achievement. In spite of this move, she seems to have lost any academic ambition she may have had and left school at seventeen for a succession of jobs in Salford, which included working as a shop assistant, milk-depot clerk, and usherette. Yet her driving ambition was always to write.

When she was seventeen, she began A Taste of Honey as a novel but realised that it would be better as a play. So she took a fortnight off work to adapt her novel into a play. A Taste of Honey (1958) is about a young working-class girl who refuses to conform to her dreary surroundings. The play portrays the lives of typical workers in the north of England in an inventive way.

In 1958, A Taste of Honey was accepted by Joan Littlewood, a famous director of political theatre, who strongly believed that plays should be about ordinary people. It opened in the East End of London in May 1958, transferring to the West End early the following year, where it enjoyed a long run and won several awards. In 1960 A Taste of Honey was staged in New York and won a drama prize. Two years later Shelagh wrote the screenplay for the film version, which won an Academy Award. 1961 the play was put on screen by director Tony Richardson and starred Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan. The film turned out to become one of the key-films of the British New Wave of cinema in the Sixties. At the age of 23, Shelagh Delaney had become one of the most famous writers of her time.

Since then her writing has shown remarkable versatility. In 1963, she produced a collection of short stories entitled Sweetly Sings the Donkey, several television plays, among them Did your Nanny Come from Bergen? (1970), and St Martin's Summer (1974), award-winning scripts such as Charley Bubbles and Dance with a Stranger (1982), and radio plays such as So Does the Nightingale (1980).

Her works have formed the inspiration of several songs written by the British singer/songwriter Morrissey, and she featured on the sleeves of the Louder Than Bombs album and Girlfriend in a Coma single by his band, The Smiths.

Works

Her works include:

A Taste of Honey (1958)
The Lion in Love (1960)
Sweetly Sings the Donkey (short stories, 1963)

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