Biography
Born in Los Angeles, California, Lahr holds a B.A. from Yale University and a master's degree from Worcester College, Oxford. He has written many books, including the novels The Autograph Hound and Hot to Trot, as well as three biographies of important theatrical figures: one of his father called Notes on a Cowardly Lion; one of the British playwright Joe Orton called Prick Up Your Ears; and one of the Australian comedian Barry Humphries called Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage with Barry Humphries. In 1987 he co-produced a film version of Prick Up Your Ears directed by Stephen Frears and written by Alan Bennett in which Lahr appeared as a character played by Wallace Shawn. Lahr also wrote the foreword to Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines, a 1994 collection of Bill Hicks's work.
In 2002, Lahr became the first drama critic ever to win a Tony Award for his part in writing actress Elaine Stritch’s one–woman show, "Elaine Stritch at Liberty", for which he and Stritch also won the Drama Desk Award for the Best Book to a Musical. Among his many awards, Lahr has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
In 1994, Lahr published a profile in The New Yorker detailing the vagaries of Lady Maria St. Just, an executor of playwright Tennessee Williams's estate. The profile helped liberate Lyle Leverich's biography of Williams, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, from a four-year legal stranglehold. While working on a planned second volume in 2000, Leverich died and named Lahr as his favored successor. Lahr agreed to complete the second volume, which will follow Williams from 1945 to his death in 1983. In October 2007, Lahr said that he was taking a half-year sabbatical from writing New Yorker profiles to work on the biography, and stated, "I'll probably finish it when I'm in my seventies."
Lahr was married for many years to the late Anthea Mander, daughter of the Liberal politician, art patron and industrialist Sir Geoffrey Mander, of the prominent Midlands family. In 1988, Lahr began a relationship with former actress Connie Booth; they married in 2000 and live together in London. His sister is the editor and writer Jane Lahr.
Lahr has contributed to John Kerry's presidential campaign and Democratic organizations.
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“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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