Noël Coward was an English playwright, actor, and composer known for his polished comedies of manners. He began performing professionally as an actor at age 12 and wrote his first successful plays in the 1920s, including Hay Fever in 1925. Some of his most popular plays were the comedies Private Lives from 1930, Design for Living from 1933, and Present Laughter from 1939. Coward was knighted in 1970 and spent his later years chiefly in the Caribbean and Switzerland.
Noël Coward was an English playwright, actor, and composer known for his polished comedies of manners. He began performing professionally as an actor at age 12 and wrote his first successful plays in the 1920s, including Hay Fever in 1925. Some of his most popular plays were the comedies Private Lives from 1930, Design for Living from 1933, and Present Laughter from 1939. Coward was knighted in 1970 and spent his later years chiefly in the Caribbean and Switzerland.
Noël Coward was an English playwright, actor, and composer known for his polished comedies of manners. He began performing professionally as an actor at age 12 and wrote his first successful plays in the 1920s, including Hay Fever in 1925. Some of his most popular plays were the comedies Private Lives from 1930, Design for Living from 1933, and Present Laughter from 1939. Coward was knighted in 1970 and spent his later years chiefly in the Caribbean and Switzerland.
Noël Coward was an English playwright, actor, and composer known for his polished comedies of manners. He began performing professionally as an actor at age 12 and wrote his first successful plays in the 1920s, including Hay Fever in 1925. Some of his most popular plays were the comedies Private Lives from 1930, Design for Living from 1933, and Present Laughter from 1939. Coward was knighted in 1970 and spent his later years chiefly in the Caribbean and Switzerland.
Noël Coward, in full Sir Noël Peirce Coward, (born December 16, 1899, Teddington, near London, England— died March 26, 1973, St. Mary, Jamaica), English playwright, actor, and composer best known for highly polished comedies of manners 1.
Coward appeared professionally as an actor from the age of 12. Between acting engagements he wrote such light comedies as I’ll Leave It to You (1920) and The Young Idea (1923), but his reputation as a playwright was not established until the serious play The Vortex (1924), which was highly successful in London. In 1925 the first of his durable comedies, Hay Fever, opened in London. Coward ended the decade with his most popular musical play, Bitter Sweet (1929).
Another of his classic comedies, Private Lives (1930), is often revived. It shares with Design for Living (1933) a worldly milieu and characters unable to live with or without one another. His patriotic pageant of British history, Cavalcade (1931), traced an English family from the time of the South African (Boer) War through the end of World War I. Other successes included Tonight at Eight-thirty (1936), a group of one-act plays performed by Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, with whom he often played. He rewrote one of the short plays, Still Life, as the film Brief Encounter (1946). Present Laughter (1939) and Blithe Spirit (1941; filmed 1945; musical version, High Spirits, 1964) are usually listed among his better comedies.
In his plays Coward caught the clipped speech and brittle disillusion of the generation that emerged from World War I. His songs and revue sketches also struck the world-weary note of his times. Coward had another style, sentimental but theatrically effective, that he used for romantic, backward-glancing musicals and for plays constructed around patriotism or some other presumably serious theme. He performed almost every function in the theatre—including producing, directing, dancing, and singing in a quavering but superbly timed and articulate baritone—and acted in, wrote, and directed motion pictures as well.
Coward’s Collected Short Stories appeared in 1962, followed by a further selection, Bon Voyage, in 1967. Pomp and Circumstance (1960) is a light novel, and Not Yet the Dodo (1967) is a collection of verse. His autobiography through 1931 appeared as Present Indicative (1937) and was extended through his wartime years in Future Indefinite (1954); a third volume, Past Conditional, was incomplete at his death. Among his more notable songs were “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” “I’ll See You Again,” “Some Day I’ll Find You,” “Poor Little Rich Girl,” “Mad About the Boy,” and “I Went to a Marvellous Party.”
Coward was knighted in 1970. He spent his last years chiefly in the Caribbean and Switzerland. One of his previously unpublished plays, The Better Half, last performed in 1922 and thought to have been lost, was rediscovered in 2007. That same year a collection of his letters was published as The Letters of Noël Coward.
1 A kind of comedy representing the complex and sophisticated code of behaviour current in fashionable circles of society, where appearances count for more than true moral character. Its plot usually revolves around intrigues of lust and greed, the self-interested cynicism of the characters being masked by decorous pretence. Unlike satire, the comedy of manners tends to reward its cleverly unscrupulous characters rather than punish their immorality. Its humour relies chiefly upon elegant verbal wit and repartee. In England, the comedy of manners flourished as the dominant form of Restoration comedy in the works of Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley (notably The Country Wife, 1675), and William Congreve; it was revived in a more subdued form in the 1770s by Goldsmith and Sheridan, and later by Oscar Wilde. Modern examples of the comedy of manners include Noël Coward's Design for Living (1932) and Joe Orton's Loot (1965). For a fuller account, consult David L. Hirst, Comedy of Manners (1979).
