Early Life and Career
John Henley Jasper Heathcote-Williams was born in Helsby, Cheshire. After his schooldays at Eton, he changed his name to Heathcote Williams. His father, also named Heathcote Williams, was a lawyer. From his early twenties, Williams has enjoyed a minor cult following. His first book was The Speakers (1964), an account of life at Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park. In 1974, it was adapted for the stage by the Joint Stock Theatre Company.
His first full-length play, AC/DC (1970), a critique of the burgeoning mental health industry, includes a thinly veiled attack on his fellow denizen of 1960s alternative society, and doyen of the anti-psychiatry movement, R.D. Laing. Its production at the Royal Court Theatre, did not, however, appear to impede cordial relations between the two in later years. AC/DC won the London Evening Standard's Most Promising Play Award. It also received the 1972 John Whiting Award for being "a new and distinctive development in dramatic writing with particular relevance to contemporary society." It was described in the Times Literary Supplement in a front-page review by Charles Marowitz as 'the first play of the 21st century.' AC/DC was produced in New York in 1971 at the Chelsea Theater Center at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Other plays include the one-act monologue Hancock's Last Half Hour, The Local Stigmatic, The Immortalist, and the impossible to categorise Remember The Truth Dentist — an early effort, again at the Royal Court, directed by fellow-contrarian Ken Campbell.
The inaugural issue of the London Review of Books included an effusive profile by fellow Etonian Francis Wyndham titled The Magic of Heathcote Williams. His foremost fans among the famous are the late Harold Pinter and Al Pacino.
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