Alan Bennett(1934–)

Alan Bennett was born at Armley on the working-class west side of Leeds on 9 May 1934, son of a Co-operative Society butcher. He was the first in his family through the eleven-plus, took a first in medieval history at Exeter College, Oxford in 1957, and was a junior history lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1960 when Dudley Moore brought him into the Oxford-Cambridge revue being assembled for the Edinburgh Festival.

Beyond the Fringe opened on the fringe of the 1960 Edinburgh Festival on 22 August 1960, written and performed by four men: Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller from Cambridge, Dudley Moore and Bennett from Oxford. It aimed the rapid-fire sketch comedy of the university revues at the institutions British comedy had previously protected. It ran the Edinburgh fringe, transferred to the West End for two years and to Broadway for fourteen months, and the British and American satirical-comedy revolution is now dated from it.

He did not want a career as a comedian. He left the team in 1964, moved to a flat in Camden Town, and began the stage plays of the next decade: Forty Years On (1968) with John Gielgud, Habeas Corpus (1973) and The Old Country (1977), both with Alec Guinness. By the late 1970s his stage voice, the ironic Yorkshire phrasing turned on the subjects of the English liberal establishment, was the most distinctive on the British stage.

Talking Heads came in 1988: six twenty-five-minute monologue television-plays for BBC One, each carrying the emotional structure of a small realistic novel on a single face. A second series followed in 1998. The Bennett monologue has been the English-language model for the form ever since, taught on postgraduate television-writing courses as the foundational text.

He came out publicly as gay in the 2004 memoir Untold Stories, at seventy; his long partner is the magazine editor Rupert Thomas. The History Boys (2004) at the National Theatre and on Broadway won three Olivier Awards and six Tony Awards including Best Play. He accepted a Companion of the British Empire and declined a knighthood. The Bennett name, the medieval patronymic of Benedict, the Latin-Christian blessed, carries him from a Leeds Co-operative butcher's family into the centre of the English literary establishment of the second half of the twentieth century.