Shelagh Delaney

Delaney was featured twice on Smiths record sleeves, including this one for their 1987 single, "Girlfriend in a Coma".

Shelagh Delaney, FRSL (born 25 November 1939) is an English playwright, best known for her debut work, A Taste of Honey.

She was born in Broughton, Salford to Irish immigrant parents and attended three different primary schools. After failing the eleven-plus examination to qualify for grammar school, she went to Broughton Secondary School, where she saw her first stage production, an amateur performance of Othello at the age of 12.

Delaney eventually transferred to the local grammar school where she had a record of fair achievement. She left school at seventeen for a succession of jobs in Salford, which included shop assistant, milk-depot clerk, and usherette. Her driving ambition was always to write.

At age seventeen Delaney began A Taste of Honey as a novel, but soon realised that it would work better as a play. It focuses on a teen-aged working-class girl who refuses to conform to her dreary surroundings. The play portrays the lives of typical workers in the north of England in an inventive way.

A Taste of Honey was accepted by Joan Littlewood, artistic director of the Theatre Workshop, who strongly believed that plays should be about ordinary people. It opened at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London on 27 May 1958, and on 10 February 1959, transferred to Wyndham's Theatre in the West End, where it enjoyed a long run and won several awards. On 4 October 1960 the play opened at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre with Joan Plowright, Angela Lansbury and Billy Dee Williams. Two years later, Delaney co-wrote the adaptation for the film version, with director Tony Richardson, which starred Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan and won Delaney and Richardson a BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay. The film was one of the key films of the British New Wave of cinema.

She has written a collection of short stories Sweetly Sings the Donkey, several television plays, including Did your Nanny Come from Bergen? (1970), and St Martin's Summer (1974), award-winning scripts such as Charlie Bubbles (1967) and Dance with a Stranger (1985), and radio plays, i.e. So Does the Nightingale (1980), but Delaney never repeated the level of success she did with her first play.

Honours

In 1985, Delaney was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Family

She has one daughter, Charlotte, born in 1964 in London.

External links

• Encyclopedia entry for Delaney
• IMDb entry
• The Orlando Project