If you liked Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter
...then here’s a couple more memoirs that might move you...
The Life of Kenneth Tynan by Kathleen Tynan
Kenneth Tynan’s widow Kathleen traces the life of the famed drama critic and first man to swear on the BBC, from his illegitimate birth to his establishment as the enfant terrible of British theatre and one of the most influential critics of his time.
'Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds' - these instructions were pinned above the desk of Kenneth Tynan and he followed them religiously. He was the first drama critic since Bernard Shaw, architect of Olivier's National Theatre repertoire, deviser of the erotic review Oh! Calcutta!, journalist and social reformer. In this moving and sometimes shocking biography Kathleen Tynan traces her husband's life from his provincial childhood, through his rebellious undergraduate years at Oxford to his dazzling career as the 'first postwar British myth' - actor, director, writer, flamboyant personality and provocateur of the Establishment on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw by Sheila Hancock
Sheila Hancock's affectionate memoir follows both her own life and that of her husband John Thaw’s in this double biography.
When John Thaw, star of The Sweeney and Inspector Morse, died from cancer in 2002, a nation lost one of its finest actors and Sheila Hancock lost a beloved husband. In this unique double biography she chronicles their lives - personal and professional, together and apart. John Thaw was born in Manchester, the son of a lorry driver. When he arrived at RADA on a scholarship he felt an outsider. In fact his timing was perfect: it was the sixties and television was beginning to make its mark. With his roles in Z-Cars and The Sweeney, fame came quickly. But it was John's role as Morse that made him an icon. In 1974 he married Sheila Hancock, with whom he shared a working-class background and a RADA education. Sheila was already the star of the TV series The Rag Trade and went on to become the first woman artistic director at the RSC. Theirs was a sometimes turbulent, always passionate relationship, and in this remarkable book Sheila describes their love - weathering overwork and the pressures of celebrity, drink and cancer - with honesty and piercing intelligence, and evokes two lives lived to the utmost.
