John Osborne - Early Life

Early Life

Osborne was born in December 1929 in London, the son of Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a commercial artist and advertising copywriter of South Welsh extraction, and Nellie Beatrice, a Cockney barmaid. He adored his father and hated his mother, who he later wrote taught him "The fatality of hatred … She is my disease, an invitation to my sick room", and described her as "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent". Thomas died in 1941, leaving the young boy an insurance settlement which he used to finance a private education at Belmont College, a minor public school in Devon. He entered the school in 1943 but was expelled in the summer term of 1945 after whacking the headmaster, who had struck him for listening to a forbidden broadcast by Frank Sinatra. School Certificate was the only formal qualification he acquired, but he possessed a native intelligence.

After school, Osborne went home to his mother in London and briefly tried trade journalism. A job tutoring a touring company of junior actors introduced him to the theatre. He soon became involved as a stage manager and acting, joining Anthony Creighton's provincial touring company. Osborne tried his hand at writing plays, co-writing his first, The Devil Inside Him, with his mentor Stella Linden, who then directed it at the Theatre Royal in Huddersfield in 1950. Around this time he also married Pamela Lane. His second play Personal Enemy was written with Anthony Creighton (with whom he later wrote Epitaph for George Dillon staged at the Royal Court in 1958). Personal Enemy was staged in regional theatres before he submitted Look Back in Anger.