Noel Coward
born December 16, 1899, Teddington, near
London, England
died March 26, 1973, St. Mary, Jamaica
English playwright, actor, and composer best
known for highly polished comedies of
manners.
Coward appeared professionally as an
actor from the age of 12. Between acting
engagements he wrote such light comedies as
I’ll Leave It to You (1920) and The Young
Idea (1923), but his reputation as a
playwright was not established until the
serious play The Vortex (1924), which was
highly successful in London. In 1925 the
first of his durable comedies, Hay Fever,
opened in London. Coward ended the decade
with his most popular musical play, Bitter
Sweet (1929).
Another of his classic comedies, Private
Lives (1930), is often revived. It shares
with Design for Living (1933) a worldly
milieu and characters unable to live with or
without one another. His patriotic pageant
of British history, Cavalcade (1931), traced
an English family from the time of the South
African (Boer) War through the end of World
War I. Other successes included Tonight at
Eight-Thirty (1936), a group of one-act
plays performed by Coward and Gertrude
Lawrence, with whom he often played. He
rewrote one of the short plays, Still Life,
as the film Brief Encounter (1946). Present
Laughter (1939) and Blithe Spirit (1941;
filmed 1945; musical version, High Spirits,
1964) are usually listed among his better
comedies.
In his plays Coward caught the clipped
speech and brittle disillusion of the
generation that emerged from World War I.
His songs and revue sketches also struck the
world-weary note of his times. Coward had
another style, sentimental but theatrically
effective, that he used for romantic,
backward-glancing musicals and for plays
constructed around patriotism or some other
presumably serious theme. He performed
almost every function in the
theatre—including producing, directing,
dancing, and singing in a quavering but
superbly timed and articulate baritone—and
acted in, wrote, and directed motion
pictures as well.
Coward’s Collected Short Stories appeared
in 1962, followed by a further selection,
Bon Voyage, in 1967. Pomp and Circumstance
(1960) is a light novel, and Not Yet the
Dodo (1967) is a collection of verse. His
autobiography through 1931 appeared as
Present Indicative (1937) and was extended
through his wartime years in Future
Indefinite (1954); a third volume, Past
Conditional, was incomplete at his death.
Among his more notable songs are “Mad Dogs
and Englishmen,” “I’ll See You Again,” “Some
Day I’ll Find You,” “Poor Little Rich Girl,”
“Mad About the Boy,” and “Marvellous Party.”
Coward was knighted in 1970. He spent his
last years chiefly in the Caribbean and
Switzerland. One of his previously
unpublished plays, The Better Half, last
performed in 1922 and thought to have been
lost, was rediscovered in 2007. That same
year a collection of his letters was
published as The Letters of Noël Coward.
