(12 March 1928 - 15 September 2016)
Essentially a man of the theatre, American playwright Edward Albee never wrote for the cinema, However, his most famous play from 1962 also became celebrated on film. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed by Mike Nichols in 1966, details the destructive nature of a marriage as George, a university professor, and his wife Martha peel off the layers of their relationship to reveal a basic hatred of one another. This is played out before two younger guests, Nick and Honey. The film was Oscar-nominated in thirteen categories including the four actors, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal and Sandy Dennis, but only Taylor and Dennis won the awards, although the film also won for best cinematography, art direction and costume design. The screenplay by Ernest Lehman was the only Albee play ever to be filmed. Albee himself adapted novels for the theatre including Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Nabokov’s Lolita, but both flopped, and he did a stage version of Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991), subsequently filmed by Merchant-Ivory using Michael Hirst’s screenplay based on the novella and Albee’s play. Albee’s first play was The Zoo Story in 1959, and of his thirty others he is best remembered for Tiny Alice, A Delicate Balance (filmed by Tony Richardson, starring Katharine Hepburn Paul Scofield and Lee Remick, and released theatrically in Britain), The Lady From Dubuque, Three Tall Women, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? and, of course, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Some of his plays were produced on television and Albee himself took part in many TV documentaries on the performing arts.
MICHAEL DARVELL
