Angry old man

A newbiography of the late John Osborne published this week recounts that one of his wives was asthmatic, so he used to pin her to the floor and breathe cigarette smoke down her throat' another wife tried to drown herself in the swimming pool, so he refused to intervene, and a guest had to dive in to rescue her' and he described another wife's suicide as "the coarse posturing of an overheated housemaid". He kicked his 16-year-old daughter out of the house for good because he judged her "criminally commonplace" with "no inner life whatever". And when his 87-year-old mother passed away, he said: "A year in which my mother died cannot be all bad."

Osborne, left, is remembered as a major figure in 20th-century culture, the original angry young man, and the writer who changed theatre for ever with Look Back in Anger. He's fortunate that the private lives of playwrights are not considered remotely as newsworthy as the private lives of politicians, or he might well be remembered rather differently.

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