John Osborne; Playwright Wrote ‘Look Back in Anger’

John Osborne, the Oscar-winning playwright who made his mark as one of the “angry young men” of British theater and who kept up his iconoclastic conduct long after, has died of heart failure in a hospital near his home in Shropshire, a spokesman said Monday. He was 65.

Osborne’s seminal play, “Look Back in Anger,” transformed British theater in 1956, opening the way for what would be described as “kitchen sink” drama--the portrayal of the gritty realism of working-class life that also reflected the playwright’s own background.

Jimmy Porter, the antihero of “Look Back,” railed against the Establishment and its values, as did the author, who became a voice for the disgruntled of Britain’s post-war generation. Richard Burton starred in a 1958 film version of the work.

Osborne won his Oscar for his screenplay of the 1964 film “Tom Jones.”

Among his other notable works are “The Entertainer,” which many critics saw as a metaphor for a declining Britain and which starred Sir Laurence Olivier, “Luther” and “Inadmissible Evidence.”

In 1992, Osborne updated the Jimmy Porter story with a new play, “Deja Vu,” in which his old hero now lives comfortably but rages against homosexuals and “luvvies,” theatrical and literary folk. The work was a critical and box-office failure.

Osborne in his private life adopted the angry man persona. He was notorious for his hard drinking and irascibility. In a recent interview, he asked: “Who wants to live to 110 anyway if it means not smoking and not drinking?”

Married five times, he savaged some of his wives in his autobiography and called his mother “hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent.”

Helen Dawson, his fifth wife, was at his hospital bedside when he died Saturday. His other wives were Pamela Lane, actress Mary Ure, writer Penelope Gilliatt and actress Jill Bennett.

Osborne described Bennett in his memoirs, “Almost a Gentleman,” as “the most evil woman I’ve ever come across” and called her suicide the “coarse posturing of an overheated housemaid.”

Osborne was a fixture on the London theatrical scene and became notorious for firing off letters to newspapers and speaking out on a range of topics that piqued him.

He once said critics were “nearly all cripples suffering from some terrible disease.” At the Writers’ Guild Awards in London two years ago, he denounced British theater as “this horrible profession which has never been held in more contempt.”

In his polemic “Damn You, England,” he ripped his country, saying of it: “You’re rotting now, and quite soon you’ll disappear . . . untouchable, unteachable, impregnable.”

Osborne began his career as an actor but started writing plays at age 19. He moved from London to Clunton, Shropshire, in a deliberate attempt to flee the literary Establishment.

Upon his death, which occurred after he was hospitalized for a diabetic condition, his friends took note of his abundant bile but also praised his talents.

“He was a revolutionary writer,” playwright Arthur Miller said. “He opened up British theater . . . and I suppose everybody is indebted to him for that.”

Osborne “was wonderfully vindictive,” Sheridan Morley, an author, playwright and critic, said. “He took no prisoners, gave no hostages. He was full of loathing . . . and yet there was a richness of language in John. He wrote wonderful roles, wonderful speeches. . . . What is important is the energy of the man. He had this tremendous raging against the light. Whatever it was, John was there to hate it.”