My Life with Noel Coward (Includes the Never-Before-Published Theatre Writings of Noel Coward) - Hardcover

Graham Payn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1557831904 ISBN 13: 9781557831903

Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2000

Synopsis

(Applause Books). This is the definitive memoir of the private Noel Coward by the only man with the compassionate insight and first-hand experience to write it. Graham Payn, star of many of Coward's shows, shared the Master's professional and private life for thirty years. When Coward kept the rest of the world at bay, Payn remained at his side as confidant and friend. No one else was as privy to Coward's doubts and dreams.

About this title

Review:

Graham Payn first met Noel Coward at age 13, when he auditioned for the playwright by tap dancing while singing "Nearer My God to Thee." He became Coward's longtime companion. So perhaps Payn knew better than anyone the personal side of Noel Coward, whose public personae had the trappings of an enchanted life but whose private life has been more difficult to capture. "His manner created distance between himself and those who would approach him." Payn says. This biography helps give a portrait of the playwright and tells of his vast accomplishments. The book should help keep Coward's work alive.

From Booklist:

While he was alive, Noel Coward the urbane public wit often overshadowed Coward the accomplished writer who was responsible for such twentieth-century masterpieces as Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Blithe Spirit. Happily, art, like murder, will out. In the 21 years since his death, Coward's reputation as a playwright has grown. Payn's loving, immensely likable memoir of his longtime friend will not change public perceptions of Coward. It contains no dirt about the man or his unofficial family. The readable, sometimes digressive remembrance does, however, provide an interesting, often tartly witty portrait of Coward during the most difficult years of his life, the period just after World War II when his work and "Cowardy" style was suddenly unfashionable. Students of theater will find especially fascinating the master's previously unpublished essays with which Payn concludes the book; they include Coward's famous series of blistering (London) Sunday Times articles attacking the fashionable "experimental work" of the post-World War II British playwrights. Jack Helbig

About this edition

• Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1557831904
• ISBN 13: 9781557831903
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 404