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
Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
We have smaller defensive ends, but they're quick. They'll be OK. Everybody knows their job, and our defense is better this year. If we play better in the second half of the game this year, we'll do better.
That's a great benefit. After we chose the cast, we educated them into the play. We taught them. One of the blessings of being at the National Theatre is that you have a very long rehearsal 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.
I always like to break out and address the audience. In 'The History Boys', for instance, without any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up.
I've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.
Last year we were more of a running team. This year we're more versatile.
that interest comes from my partner Rupert. But I used to do it when I was young and a lot of that fed into The History Boys.
If, for instance, we'd made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it. We didn't have to do any alterations for Broadway. I was supposed to go a fortnight before it opened to alter anything that was necessary and there was nothing really.
f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!