The English playwright, actor, and composer Noel Coward (1899-1973) was known for his genial urbanity and frequently acerbic wit. Noel Coward was born on December 16, 1899, in Teddingham, Middlesex, and studied intermittently at the Royal Chapel School...

Noel Coward was, after George Bernard Shaw, modern England's most prolific writer for the London stage. Throughout a career that spanned more than half a century, Coward was associated with the luminaries of the theater. He developed a witty, sharp,...

"For me, the prewar past died on the day Mr. Neville Chamberlain returned with such gay insouciance from Munich," Noel Coward wrote in his diary (26 July 1945). Coward went on to write some twenty plays, a novel, several short stories, and the lyrics...

Ian Bostridge; Jeffrey Tate, piano. EMI 7243 5 57374-2. Most young people won't recognize the man at all, but for older folks the name "Noel Coward" conjures up images of urbane, sophisticated song and patter, the vocal equivalent of a dancing Fred...

HONEYMOON By Amy Jenkins (Flame, 10) WELL, come back Bridget Jones. Amy Jenkins famously got 600,000 for two novels, on the basis of a synopsis of this one, before she'd written more than a few pages. Foreign rights and film rights have more...

Sheridan Morley, a theater critic, broadcaster and author of many show-business biographies, has died at the age of 65.Morley, who wrote for such publications as The Times of London, Punch, The Spectator and the International Herald Tribune, died Friday at home. The BBC reported that...

Sheryl Crow, eyes rolling, apparently scoffed at mention of ex-beaux Lance Armstrong’s Ashley-Olsen antics; Tory Burch, on the other hand, doesn’t care. [Page Six] Ethiopian woman claims to be the mother of Zahara Jolie-Pitt, and she wants to “be with her.” [Rush & Malloy:...

One does not usually think of the late Sir Noël Coward, that ubiquitous eminence of the British theatre for five decades, as being particularly a "political" dramatist…. Even critics and students of the theatre appraising his career generally begin by acknowledging his wide-ranging versatility and then tend to concentrate their attentions on his major, most frequently staged comedies. Those plays (Hay Fever, Private Lives, Blithe Spirit, Design For Living, and Present Laughter) a...

Reading Noel Coward's plays encourages the belief that there is a point where Literature and Show Business meet. While it is difficult to know exactly what happens there, these four volumes of his plays [Coward Plays], which take us up to 1941, certainly suggest that it may have provided Coward with the criteria as well as the conditions within which he conceived his work. (p. 46) Coward's earlier plays prick at the pomposity principles of English life. Modernity, in behaviour, codes of conduc...

Mr. Coward, who has often been held up as himself the prototype of the post-war young man, does not fulfil the popular conception of an irritable and irritating person, dispirited and boneless, who drifts about asking people what he shall do to be saved. If anybody has worked in the past sixteen years, Mr. Coward indisputably has. In spite, however, of the profound dissimilarity between him and the young men whose prototype he is said to be, there is, I think, ample warrant for regarding him as their protot...