Terence Mervyn Rattigan was born in London on June 10, 1911,the son of a career diplomat and serial philanderer whose indiscretionsresulted in his being cashiered by the Foreign Office. As a member ofthe lower upper-middle class in the inter-war period, the youngRattigan received a first-rate education at Harrow and Trinity College,Oxford. His was a privileged, intellectual background that is reflectedin his plays. For a decade after the Second World War, he was one ofEngland's leading playwrights, but the eruption of the "kitchen-sink"school of English drama in the mid-1950s scuttled his critical reputation.

Rattigan achieved his first success as a playwright at age 25 with thelight comedy "French Without Tears" (1936), which was a smash in theWest End. Determined to do more serious work, he wrote the satiricalsocial drama "After the Dance" in 1939, which skewered the failure ofthe class of "Bright Young Things" to prevent another war. The adventof World War II truncated the play's run, but Rattigan would continue totaste sweet success for a full generation, alternating between comediesand dramas.

In the post-war period, he established himself as a major Englishdramatist with "The Winslow Boy", "The Browning Version", "The DeepBlue Sea", and "Separate Tables", all of which were made into successfulmotion pictures. A Rattigan play displayed keen craftsmanship andfinely-structured plots; emotion was hidden in the best Englishmiddle-class tradition, but was lurking in the depths. The typicalRattigan play was a sympathetic, witty study of middle-class people inemotional distress. There was often a love triangle or a general conflictin which decent people found themselves embroiled. These characterssublimated their emotions and passions; the psychic cost of repressionwas a focus and theme of Rattigan's work.

Rattigan's themes were personal: the illogicality of love; the conflictbetween idealized love and love as realized in the here and now; the painof lost promise; and the defeat of potential greatness by human weakness.The themes and leitmotifs in Rattigan's plays were found beneath thesurface; nothing was worn on the sleeve. They were elucidated by theplaywright's craft, through a well-constructed story and skillfully-observedcharacters.

According to Rattigan's biographer Geoffrey Wansell, he had learned howto mask his feelings from his father, whose multiple love affairs, carried onin secret behind his wife's back, appalled his son. Also, Terence was ahomosexual in an era rife with anti-gay sentiment; the persecution of thosesuffering from what was once termed "inversion" was all too real.

Rattigan lived behind a mask (he was very discreet about his own same-sexaffairs), as did the characters in his plays. Emotions were buried lest their displaycause even more pain, or scandal. Wansell believes that his reticence stemmedfrom a deeply-rooted aversion to emotional engagement. "Behind the apparentlycarefree mask lived a man crying out to be loved and appreciated," Wansell wrote,"but a man who was also incapable of demonstrating that need."

For a run of almost five straight years in the 1940s, Rattigan had plays appearingsimultaneously on the boards of three adjacent West End theaters. In 1956 theEnglish stage was revolutionized byJohn Osborne's "Look Back in Anger," in which emotions were (in the parlanceof a later generation) allowed to "all hang out." Overnight, Rattigan's dreams ofemotional repression were deemed old-fashioned. Dramatists, directors, and actorswho stuck with the old "well-crafted", more subtle paradigm of drama were alsodeemed "old-fashioned" and suffered a professional eclipse.(Laurence Olivier, who had starred inRattigan plays and movies made from his work, kept himself relevant by offeringhimself to Osborne, who crafted "The Entertainer" for him. It would be many yearsbefore his contemporariesJohn Gielgud andRalph Richardson would make itout of the woods, outside of Shakespeare, in terms of contemporarydrama. They appeared together inHarold Pinter's "No Man's Land" 20 yearsafter the changing of the guard).

"Look Back in Anger" was a cultural broadside against everything theEstablishment represented, and Rattigan was very much part of thatEstablishment. In the introduction to his collected plays, published in1959, Rattigan wrote of an archetypal playgoer, "Aunt Edna," whom hecharacterized as a "nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged maidenlady" to whom playwrights had to be responsive as she was the personwho spent her money to go to the theater. What Rattigan was trying tosay is that the theater must be responsive to its audience; to the newTurks, many of whom would later thrive in non-commercial,state-subsidized theater. Rattigan was a shameless old fart, panderingto the very class of people, the Aunt Ednas and the Miss Grundys, whomthey despised and whose tastes, and the drama and comedies written tosuit those tastes, debased the theater as an art form.

Rattigan's reputation declined and, overnight, his plays were derided by thecritics. A very sensitive man who had a terrible fear of failure, Rattigan'sconfidence declined along with his critical reputation. He retaliated the newkitchen-sink school in interviews and via dialogue in his new plays, with theresult that he underscored the new generation's contempt of him. Rattigantransformed himself into a caricature of the kind of playwright the newEnglish theater was rebelling against: conservative, staid, old-fashioned,valuing craft above feeling, with no empathy for the modern world or forthe majority of Britons. To them, he represented the complacency of amoribund Tory- and toff-dominated Britain that was no longer relevantafter the Suez debacle of 1956.

Truthfully, among the post-1956 Rattigan plays are some of his finestwork, including "Ross," "Man and Boy," and "Cause Celebre," but it didn'tmatter to the critics: he was considered hopelessly passé. Like the post-"The Night of the Iguana"Tennessee Williams, he was cruellydiscarded as a contemporary artist of any relevance. He was a phantomof a past that vanished with Britain's world-power status after Suez.

Rattigan was first diagnosed with leukemia in 1962; it went into remissionin 1964, but he suffered a relapse in 1968. Despising the "Mod" Britain ofthe 1960s, he moved to Bermuda. In that decade he supported himself bywriting screenplays, and for a while he enjoyed the status as the world'shighest-paid screenwriter. He was knighted in 1972 and moved back toEngland. His critical reputation saw a minor revival shortly before his deathfrom cancer in 1977, and a major revival in the early 21st century afterKarel Reisz staged a revival of "The Deep Blue Sea." Although hewas never as successful in the United States as he was in Britain, Rattigan isincreasingly being viewed in his homeland as one of the 20th century's finestplaywrights.