'Dearest Squirrel...': The Intimate Letters of John Osborne and Pamela Lane

(Hardback)

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A completely fresh insight into the mind of one of the UKs greatest playwrights, the letters between John Osborne and his first wife, actressPamela Lane, are also a love letter to a now defunct system of repertory theatre, and life in post-war Britain. As these letters reveal, soon after their divorce, Osborne and Lane began a mutually supportive, loyal, frequently stormy and sometimes sexually intimate alliance lasting thirty years until Osbornes death. By the mid-1980s, they had become closer and more trusting than they had been since their earliest years together. You are for me what you always were, Pamela told him, I am in love with you still. It is, he declared, my fortune to have loved someone for a lifetime. Acerbic, witty, candid and heartbreaking, they reveal a unique relationship, troubled, tender and enduring.

Author Bio

Peter Whitebrook is a journalist who has written and broadcast widely on the theatre. For many years he was the drama critic for The Scotsman. He won a Fringe First award for his co-adaptation of John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath. He has written and presented several arts documentaries for BBC Radio Scotland, Radio 4 and the World Service. He has frequently chaired events at the Edinburgh Book Festival and now does so at the Gothenburg Book Fair. He has published an acclaimed biography of theatre critic William Archer, who was the first to translate Ibsen into English, and was a consultant and contributor to a major Channel 4 documentary on John Osborne. John Osborne was born in London in 1929. He worked as a journalist for a number of trade magazines before becoming an Assistant Stage Manager and actor with several repertory companies. Look Back in Anger (1956) has come to stand as a key text for modern British Drama, and prompted other successes with The Entertainer and Epitaph for George Dillon. He was the first of many writers to be 'discovered' by the Royal Court Theatre, and Look Back in Anger was the first of the Royal Court's plays to be internationally recognised. Osborne adapted Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer for film. He also wrote an Oscar winning screenplay adaptation of Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones.