Trailblazing playwright Delaney dies of cancer

PLAYWRIGHT Shelagh Delaney, best-known for her 1958 play, A Taste Of Honey, has died of cancer, her agent has said.

Delaney died at her daughter’s home in Suffolk on Sunday night, a few days before her 72nd birthday, Jane Villiers said.

A Taste Of Honey, the gritty tale of a young woman who gets pregnant following a one-night stand with a black sailor and is cared for by a gay friend, caused controversy when it was first performed, when Delaney was just 19.

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However, it enjoyed success in London and New York and was later adapted into a film, directed by Tony Richardson.

The 1961 film starred Rita Tushingham and won four Baftas, including best British screenplay, which she won with Richardson.

Delaney penned the play in just two weeks, adapting it from a novel she had been writing.

She penned it feeling that having seen Terence Rattigan’s Variations On A Theme, she could do better.

The Beatles were said to be fans, recording their own version of the theme from the film adaptation of A Taste Of Honey.

Delaney’s work was rooted in her home town of Salford and she hit out at theatre which did not portray “life as the majority of ordinary people know it”.

In 1960, her second play, The Lion In Love, about a difficult marriage, opened but did not enjoy the same success as the kitchen-sink drama A Taste Of Honey.

Delaney then wrote screenplays such as The White Bus (1967), Charlie Bubbles (1967), starring Albert Finney, and The Raging Moon (1970).

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She also wrote the screenplay for the 1985 film Dance With A Stranger, starring Miranda Richardson in the fictional retelling of the last woman to be executed for a crime in Britain.

Delaney is survived by her daughter, Charlotte Delaney, and three grandchildren.

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