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Cultural impact of Noël Coward


A prolific playwright and successful actor and director, Noël Coward has had a significant impact on culture in the English-speaking world. Time magazine said that he had a unique "sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".

Coward wrote over 50 published plays and many albums of original songs, in addition to musical theatre (including the operetta Bitter Sweet), comic revues, poetry, short stories, a novel and three volumes of autobiography. Books of his song lyrics, diaries and letters also have been published. Some of his plays, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, have entered the regular theatre repertoire. His stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, and his cabaret performances were very popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Coward won an Academy Honorary Award in 1943 for his naval film drama In Which We Serve. Many of Coward's plays were adapted for film.

Coward was knighted in 1969 and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. A statue of Coward was unveiled by the Queen Mother in the foyer of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1998. The Noël Coward Theatre in St Martin's Lane, originally called the New Theatre, was renamed in his honour in 2006.

The playwright John Osborne said, "Mr Coward is his own invention and contribution to this century. Anyone who cannot see that should keep well away from the theatre." Kenneth Tynan wrote in 1964, "Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years' time, exactly what we mean by 'a very Noel Coward sort of person'."The Times said of him, "None of the great figures of the English theatre has been more versatile than he," and the paper ranked his plays in "the classical tradition of Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw". In praise of his versatility, another admirer said, "There are probably greater painters than Noël, greater novelists than Noël, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars. If there are, they are fourteen different people. Only one man combined all fourteen different labels – The Master."


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