Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett
Alan Bennettis an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. He was born in Leeds and attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth9 May 1934
I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don't think it was decided at that meeting. The trouble is, as soon as you've chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of. It's like going to a place that you've never been to before - you've got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury's, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I'm conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
There's very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made. Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure. . . . A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth's.
Last year we were more of a running team. This year we're more versatile.
This symposium will highlight the surprisingly diverse and positive role that cocoa can potentially play in improving public health and reinvigorating endangered tropical ecosystems. It also underscores the impact that collaborative efforts among public and private sector scientists can have in a relatively short time.
I can't complain that I've had a public all through my writing life, but people don't quite know what I've written. People don't read you too closely. Perhaps, after I've died, they'll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there's more in it. That may be wrong, but that's what I comfort myself with.
Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease, even, so that if I start off undressed, I have nowhere to go.
I'm more socialist certainly than New Labour - I'm very old Labour, really.
I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.