1970s and Later Life
John Osborne's plays in the 1970s included West of Suez which starred Ralph Richardson, A Sense of Detachment, first produced at the Royal Court in 1972, and Watch It Come Down, first produced at the National Theatre at the Old Vic starring Frank Finlay.
In 1971, he made his best remembered acting appearance, lending Cyril Kinnear a sense of civil menace in Get Carter. In 1978 he appeared as an actor in Tomorrow Never Comes and in 1980 in Flash Gordon.
Through the 1980s Osborne played the role of Shropshire squire with great pleasure and a heavy dose of irony. He wrote a diary for The Spectator. He opened his garden to raise money for the church roof, from which he threatened to withdraw covenant-funding unless the vicar restored the Book of Common Prayer. (He had returned to the Church of England about 1974.)
In his latter years, Osborne published two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person (Osborne, 1981) and Almost a Gentleman (Osborne, 1991). A Better Class of Person was filmed by Thames TV in 1985 and was nominated for the Prix Italia with Eileen Atkins and Alan Howard as his parents and Gary Capelin and Neil McPherson as Osborne.
He also collected various newspaper and magazine writings together in 1994 under the title Damn You, England. At his memorial service in 1995, playwright David Hare said:
| “ | It is, if you like, the final irony that John's governing love was for a country which is, to say the least, distrustful of those who seem to be both clever and passionate. There is in English public life an implicit assumption that the head and the heart are in some sort of opposition. If someone is clever, they get labelled cold. If they are emotional, they get labelled stupid. Nothing bewilders the English more than someone who exhibits great feeling and great intelligence. When, as in John's case, a person is abundant in both, the English response is to take in the washing and bolt the back door. | ” |
His last play was Déjà Vu (1991), a sequel to Look Back in Anger.
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