Sir Noel Coward

Noel Coward born 16 December 1899 (d. 1973)

Sir Noel Peirce Coward was an English actor, playwright, and composer of popular music.

Born in Teddington, Middlesex to a middle-class family, he began performing in the West End at an early age.

A student at the Italia Conti Academy stage school, Coward’s first professional engagement was on 27 January 1911, in the children’s play, The Goldfish. After this appearance, he was sought after for children’s roles by other professional theatres.

At the age of fourteen he was the lover of Philip Streatfield, a society painter who took him in and introduced him to high society before his untimely death due to disease during WWI.

He was featured in several productions with Sir Charles Hawtrey, a Victorian actor and comedian, whom Coward idolised and to whom he virtually apprenticed himself until he was twenty. It was from Hawtrey that Coward learned comic acting techniques and playwriting. He was drafted briefly into the British Army during World War I but was discharged due to ill health. Coward appeared in the D. W. Griffith film Hearts of the World (1918) in an uncredited role. He found his voice and began writing plays that he and his friends could star in while at the same time writing revues.

Coward's insights into the class system can be traced back to London life in World War I, when thousands of troops passed through the capital every day, and gay officers and other-ranks would meet together with civilians in dozens of highly-secret clubs.

Much of Coward's best work came in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Enormous (and enormously popular) productions such as the full-length operetta Bitter Sweet (1929) and Cavalcade (1931), a huge extravaganza requiring a very large cast, gargantuan sets and an exceedingly complex hydraulic stage, were interspersed with finely-wrought comedies such as Private Lives (1930), in which Coward himself starred alongside his most famous stage partner Gertrude Lawrence, and the black comedy Design for Living (1932), written for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

Coward again partnered Lawrence in Tonight at 8:30 (1936), an ambitious cycle of ten different short plays which were randomly 'shuffled' to make up a different playbill of three plays each night. One of these short plays, Still Life, was later expanded into the 1945 David Lean film Brief Encounter. He was also a prolific writer of popular songs, and a lucrative recording contract with HMV allowed him to release a number of recordings which have been extensively reissued on CD. Coward's most popular hits include the romantic, I'll See You Again and Dear Little Cafe, as well as the comic Mad Dogs and Englishmen, The Stately Homes of England and (Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage) Mrs Worthington.

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 saw Coward working harder than ever. When the second World War started, Noel had only just left Paris. He took time off from writing to perform for the troops, but after was eager to return. Alongside his highly-publicised tours entertaining Allied troops, Coward was also engaged by the British Secret Service MI5 to conduct intelligence work. He was often frustrated by criticism he faced for his ostensibly glamorous lifestyle; criticised for apparently living the high life while his countrymen suffered, he was unable to defend himself by revealing details of his work for the Secret Service.

He also wrote and released some extraordinarily popular songs during the war (the most famous of which are London Pride and Don't Let's Be Beastly To The Germans). He complained to his frequent painting companion, Winston Churchill, that he felt he wasn't doing enough to support the war effort. Churchill suggested he make a movie based on the career of Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten. The result was a naval film drama, In Which We Serve, which Coward wrote, starred in, composed the music for and co-directed with David Lean. The film was immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic and Coward was awarded an honorary Oscar.

The 1940s also saw Coward write some of his best plays. The social commentary of This Happy Breed and the intricate semi-autobiographical comedy-drama Present Laughter (both 1939) were later combined with the hugely successful black comedy Blithe Spirit (1941) to form a West End triple-bill in which Coward starred in all three simultaneous productions. Blithe Spirit went on to break box-office records for a West End comedy not beaten until the 1970s, and was made into a film directed by David Lean.

Coward's popularity as a playwright declined sharply in the 1950s with the coming of the new realist school. Despite this, he still managed to maintain a high public profile, continuing to write (and occasionally star in) moderately successful West End plays and musicals, performing an acclaimed solo cabaret act in Las Vegas (recorded for posterity and still available on CD), and starring in films such as Bunny Lake is Missing, Around the World in 80 Days, Our Man in Havana, Boom!, and The Italian Job.

After starring in a number of American TV specials in the late 50s, Coward left the UK for tax reasons in the late 1950s and moved to the Caribbean, settling first in Bermuda and then in Jamaica, where he remained for the rest of his life.

The late 1960s saw a revival in his popularity, with several new productions of his 1920s plays and a number of revues celebrating his music; Coward himself dubbed this comeback 'Dad's Renaissance'.

By now suffering from severe arthritis and bouts of memory loss (which affected his work on The Italian Job), Coward retired from the theatre. He was knighted in 1970, and died in Jamaica in March 1973 of natural causes at the age of 73. He is buried in Firefly Hill, Jamaica.

As well as over fifty published plays and many albums' worth of original songs, Coward also wrote comic revues, poetry, several volumes of short stories, a novel (Pomp and Circumstance, 1960), and three volumes of autobiography. Books of his song lyrics, diaries and letters have also been published.

He was also a spirited painter, and a volume containing reproductions of some of his artwork has also been published.

He was a valued friend of Vivien Leigh, Judy Garland, Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. He was a close friend of Ivor Novello and Winston Churchill.

As a gay man, Coward never married. He enjoyed a lengthy relationship with the stage and film actor, Graham Payn, for almost thirty years until the end of Coward's life. Payn later edited the collection of his diaries published in 1982. He was also connected to composer Ned Rorem with details of their relationship published in Rorem's Diaries. Coward also had a long-term relationship with the Queen's uncle, Prince George, Duke of Kent (1902-42).

Coward refused to acknowledge his homosexuality, wryly stating, 'There is still a woman in Paddington Square who wants to marry me, and I don't want to disappoint her.'