Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 189926 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise"."Noel Coward at 70", Time, 26 December 1969, p. 46
Coward attended a dance academy in London as a child, making his professional stage début at the age of eleven. As a teenager he was introduced into the high society in which most of his plays would be set. Coward achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theatre works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), screenplays, poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward's stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works, as well as those of others.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Coward volunteered for war work, running the British propaganda office in Paris. He also worked with the Secret Service, seeking to use his influence to persuade the American public and government to help Britain. Coward won an Academy Honorary Award in 1943 for his naval film drama In Which We Serve and was knighted in 1970. In the 1950s he achieved fresh success as a cabaret performer, performing his own songs, such as "Mad Dogs and Englishmen", "London Pride", and "I Went to a Marvellous Party".
Coward's plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture. He did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality, but it was discussed candidly after his death by biographers including Graham Payn, his long-time partner, and in Coward's diaries and letters, published posthumously. The former Albery Theatre (originally the New Theatre) in London was renamed the Noël Coward Theatre in his honour in 2006.
Biography
Early years Coward was born on 16 December 1899 in Teddington, Middlesex, a south-western suburb of London. His parents were Arthur Sabin Coward (18561937), a piano salesman, and Violet Agnes Coward (18631954), daughter of Henry Gordon Veitch, a captain and surveyor in the Royal Navy.Morley (1974), p. 2 Noël Coward was the second of their three sons, the eldest of whom had died in 1898 at the age of six.Morley (1974), p. 3 Coward's father lacked ambition and industry, and family finances were often poor.Morley (1974), pp. 4, 8 and 67 Coward was bitten by what he called "the theatre bug" early,Magee, p. 118 and appeared in amateur concerts by the age of seven.Lesley, p. 9 He attended the Chapel Royal Choir School as a young child. He had little formal schooling but was a voracious reader.Lesley, p. 19
Encouraged by his ambitious mother, who sent him to a dance academy in London,Hoare, p. 19 Coward's first professional engagement was in January 1911 as Prince Mussel in the children's play The Goldfish."The Little Theatre", The Times, 28 January 1911, p. 12 In Present Indicative, his first volume of memoirs, Coward wrote:
The leading actor-manager Charles Hawtrey, whom the young Coward idolised and from whom he learned a great deal about the theatre, cast him in the children's play Where the Rainbow Ends. Coward played in the piece in 1911 and 1912 at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End.Hoare, pp. 23–26"Garrick Theatre", The Times, 12 December 1912, p. 8 In 1912 Coward also appeared at the Savoy Theatre in An Autumn Idyll (as a dancer in the ballet) and at the London Coliseum in A Little Fowl Play, by Harold Owen, in which Hawtrey starred."The Savoy Theatre", The Times, 26 June 1912, p. 10; "The Coliseum", 29 October 1912, p. 8; and "Varieties etc", 18 November 1912, p. 1 Italia Conti engaged Coward to appear at the Liverpool Repertory Theatre in 1913, and in the same year he was cast as the Lost Boy Slightly in Peter Pan."The Cult of Peter Pan", The Times, 24 December 1913, p. 8 He reappeared in Peter Pan the following year, and in 1915 he was again in Where the Rainbow Ends."Fairies at the Garrick", The Times, 28 December 1915, p. 10 He worked with other child actors in this period, including Hermione Gingold (whose mother threatened to turn "that naughty boy" out);Castle, p. 12 Fabia Drake; Esmé Wynne, with whom he collaborated on his earliest plays; Alfred Willmore, later known as Micheál Mac Liammóir; and Gertrude Lawrence who, Coward wrote in his memoirs, "gave me an orange and told me a few mildly dirty stories, and I loved her from then onwards."Hoare, pp. 27, 30 and 51"The Happy Family", The Times, 19 December 1916, p. 11
In 1914, when Coward was fourteen, he became the protégé and probably the lover of Philip Streatfeild, a society painter.Hoare, pp. 33–34 Streatfeild introduced him to Mrs Astley Cooper and her high society friends. Streatfeild died from tuberculosis in 1915, but Mrs Astley Cooper continued to encourage her late friend's protégé, who remained a frequent guest at her estate, Hambleton Hall in Rutland.Hoare, pp. 39–43
Coward continued to perform during most of the First World War, appearing at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1916 in The Happy Family and on tour with Amy Brandon Thomas's company in Charley's Aunt. In 1917, he appeared in The Saving Grace, a comedy produced by Hawtrey. Coward recalled in his memoirs, "My part was reasonably large and I was really quite good in it, owing to the kindness and care of Hawtrey's direction. He took endless trouble with me... and taught me during those two short weeks many technical points of comedy acting which I use to this day."Coward (Present Indicative), p. 66 Meanwhile, Coward had been writing songs. The oldest known recording of a Coward song is Bessie Jones's 1918 recording of the song "Peter Pan", cowritten with Doris Joel, which featured in the André Charlot revue Tails Up!.
In 1918, Coward was conscripted into the Artists Rifles but was assessed as unfit for active service because of a tubercular tendency, and he was discharged on health grounds after nine months.Lesley, pp. 41–42 That year he appeared in the D. W. Griffith film Hearts of the World in an uncredited role. He began writing plays, collaborating on the first two (Ida Collaborates (1917) and Women and Whisky (1918)) with his friend Esmé Wynne., The Noel Coward Society, accessed 8 February 2009 His first solo effort as a playwright was The Rat Trap (1918) which was eventually produced at the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead, in October 1926.Thaxter, John. "The Rat Trap" , British Theatre Guide, 2006, accessed 8 February 2009 During these years, he met Lorn McNaughtan, who became his private secretary and served in that capacity for more than forty years, until her death.Morley (1974), p. 52
Inter-war successes In 1920, at the age of 20, Coward starred in his own play, the light comedy I'll Leave It to You. After a three-week run in Manchester it opened in London at the New Theatre (renamed the Noël Coward Theatre in 2006), his first full-length play in the West End.Thaxter, John. I'll Leave It To You , British Theatre Guide, 2009 Neville Cardus's praise in The Manchester Guardian was grudging.Cardus, Neville. "Gaiety Theatre", The Manchester Guardian, 4 May 1920, p. 13 Notices for the London production were mixed, but encouraging.Morley (1974), p. 57 The Observer commented, "Mr Coward... has a sense of comedy, and if he can overcome a tendency to smartness, he will probably produce a good play one of these days."Ervine, St John. "At the Play", The Observer, 25 July 1920, p. 9 The Times, on the other hand, was enthusiastic: "It is a remarkable piece of work from so young a head – spontaneous, light, and always 'brainy'.""I'll Leave It to You", The Times, 22 July 1920, p. 10
The play ran for a month (and was Coward's first play seen in America), after which Coward returned to acting in works by other writers, starring as Ralph in The Knight of the Burning Pestle in Birmingham and then London.Coward (Present Indicative), pp. 104–05 and 112 He did not enjoy the role, finding Francis Beaumont and his sometime collaborator John Fletcher "two of the dullest Elizabethan writers ever known ... I had a very, very long part, but I was very, very bad at it".Castle, p. 38 Nevertheless, The Manchester Guardian thought that Coward got the best out of the role,"The Knight of the Burning Pestle", The Manchester Guardian, 25 November 1920, p. 14 and The Times called the play "the jolliest thing in London"."A Jacobean Romp", The Times, 25 November 1920, p. 10
Coward completed a one-act satire, The Better Half, about a man's relationship with two women. It had a short run at The Little Theatre, London, in 1922. The critic St John Ervine wrote of the piece, "When Mr Coward has learned that tea-table chitter-chatter had better remain the prerogative of women he will write more interesting plays than he now seems likely to write."Ervine, St John. "New Grand Guignol Series", The Observer, 4 June 1922, p. 9 The play was thought to be lost until a typescript was found in 2007 in the archive of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, the official censor of stage plays in the UK until 1968.Thorpe, Vanessa. "Coward's long-lost satire was almost too 'daring' about women", The Observer, 16 September 2007, accessed 22 September 2016
In 1921, Coward made his first trip to America, hoping to interest producers there in his plays. Although he had little luck in New York on this trip, he found the Broadway theatre stimulating.Morley (1974), p. 66; and Lesley, p. 59 He absorbed its smartness and pace into his own work, which brought him his first real success as a playwright with The Young Idea. The play opened in London in 1923, after a provincial tour, with Coward in one of the leading roles.Hoare, pp. 89–91 The reviews were good: "Mr Noël Coward calls his brilliant little farce a 'comedy of youth', and so it is. And youth pervaded the Savoy last night, applauding everything so boisterously that you felt, not without exhilaration, that you were in the midst of a 'rag'.""New Play at the Savoy", The Times, 2 February 1923, p. 8 One critic, who noted the influence of Bernard Shaw on Coward's writing, thought more highly of the play than of Coward's newly found fans: "I was unfortunately wedged in the centre of a group of his more exuberant friends who greeted each of his sallies with 'That's a Noëlism!'""The Young Idea", The Observer, 4 February 1923, p. 11 The play ran in London from 1 February to 24 March 1923, after which Coward turned to revue, co-writing and performing in Charlot's London Calling!Coward (Present Indicative), pp. 112 and 150