Death
Cooper died at the age of 48 after falling from a train as it passed through Surbiton, Surrey, returning from a Guild of Dramatists' Christmas dinner at the Garrick on 2 December 1966. A post-mortem showed he had consumed the equivalent of half a bottle of whisky and the coroner at Kingston in January 1967 returned a verdict of misadventure. There have been several attempts to attribute his death to suicide, notably by theatre journal The Stage, and when interviewed by Humphrey Carpenter in 1995, Douglas Cleverdon's widow Nest told him that she believed it was suicide. Cooper's family, understandably perhaps, have always strongly disputed this, not only because it bears no relationship to the playwright's apparent frame of mind during the period leading up to his death, but because it unfairly colours appraisal of his work from an academic standpoint.
Read more about this topic: Giles Cooper
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“So much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy—and ... to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.”
—A.C. (Algernon Charles)
“Old age is a tyrant that forbids us upon pain of death all the pleasures of youth.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)