Graham Payn

Graham Payn (25 April 1918 – 4 November 2005) was a South African-born English actor and singer, also known for being the life partner of the playwright Noël Coward. Beginning as a boy soprano, Payn later made a career as a singer and actor in the works of Coward and others. After Coward's death, Payn ran the Coward estate for 22 years.

Payn was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the son of Francis Dawnay Payn and his wife, Sybil, née Graham.

He was educated in South Africa and, after his parents divorced, in England, where he made his first stage appearance, aged 13, at the London Palladium, as Curly in Peter Pan.

In October 1931, he broadcast as a boy soprano on the BBC in a programme featuring Derek Oldham and Mabel Constanduros, and made further broadcasts in 1932 and 1933.

At the age of 14, he auditioned for the Noël Coward and Charles B. Cochran revue Words and Music (1932). His audition piece, singing "Nearer My God to Thee" while executing a tap dance, was so striking that Payn won two tiny parts in the revue. For 163 performances, he played a busker entertaining a cinema queue as a lead-in to the ballad "Mad About the Boy", and announced, in top hat, white jacket and shorts, the show's other hit song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen".

He first appeared in films as a boy soprano in the same year. When the revue closed, Payn signed a nine-week contract to sing in cinemas around Britain, but the tour was cancelled when his voice suddenly broke.

Unemployable as a boy soprano, he returned with his mother to South Africa. During the run of Words and Music, Payn had studied tap dancing with the show's choreographer, Buddy Bradley. To make a living in South Africa he taught at dancing schools in Durban and Johannesburg, reproducing Bradley's routines.

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