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...

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:...

Actress Pat Kirkwood, once a star of British musical theater, has died, a close family friend said Wednesday. She was 86.Kirkwood's career of more than 60 years included leading roles in musicals written by Noel Coward and Cole Porter. But Kirkwood was dogged her whole...

A new drama about the arms trade and an adaptation of a beloved war film are highlights of the coming season at Britain's National Theatre, artistic director Nicholas Hytner announced Thursday.Future productions include star turns for Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.Among the National's 2007-2008 shows...

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...