A prolific British playwright, songwriter and performer, whose work reflects both an acidic modern cynicism and a sentimental longing for his Edwardian childhood, the London-bred Noel Coward began acting as a child and was touring with road shows by his mid-teens. His first writing efforts included several minor comedies and revues, but fame (and notoriety) came in 1925, when Coward wrote and starred in "The Vortex", a scandalous drama about a young drug addict and his sexually voracious mother.
For the next forty years, Coward turned out play after play, many of them gems. His best-remembered works are the witty, risque comedies, such as "Hay Fever" (1925), "Private Lives" (1931), "Design for Living" (1936), "Blithe Spirit" (1941) and "Present Laughter" (1946). He also wrote patriotic looks at the British people, "Cavalcade" (1931) and "This Happy Breed" (1942), the delicate operetta "Bitter Sweet" (1929) and a series of one-acts, "Tonight at 8:30" (1935). Many of these have been revived endlessly (notably "Private Lives") and have been adapted for screen and TV. "Cavalcade" was filmed in 1933 by Frank Borzage and won that year's Oscar as Best Picture. One "Tonight at 8:30" playlet became David Lean's brilliant romantic film "Brief Encounter" (1945).
Since so much of his acting was done onstage, Coward is less remembered posthumously for this talent, but it was as an actor, rather than a writer, that he first broke into the business. His clipped, slightly lisping speech and elegant, openly gay persona made him recognizable worldwide. A modern Oscar Wilde, Coward had a biting wit which he used both onstage and off. Besides starring in and directing many of his own shows, he put his charisma to use as a nightclub performer beginning in the mid-50s.
Film acting was a lesser sideline for Coward and he often appeared in films he had not written, beginning with a walk-on in D.W. Griffith's "Hearts of the World" (1917). Coward's most brilliant film roles were as a bitter publisher who comes back from the dead in "The Scoundrel" (1935), with an Oscar-winning script by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, and as a noble British Navy Captain in the wartime film "In Which We Serve" (1942), which earned Coward an honorary Oscar. His other roles were hardly worthy of him and were taken just for the money. Coward had cameos in such latter-day comedies as "Surprise Package" and "Our Man in Havana" (both 1960), the mystery "Bunny Lake is Missing" (1965), and as the low-camp Witch of Capri alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in "Boom!" (1968).
Coward's works were appearing on the small screen as early as the 1946 version of "Blithe Spirit" (NBC). He directed and co-hosted a variety show, "Together with Music" (CBS, 1955) and directed and co-starred with Claudette Colbert in "Blithe Spirit" (CBS, 1956). His best showcases came posthumously, when PBS (1987) and A&E (1992) adapted several of his works for TV.
Besides writing plays, Coward wrote a number of novels and short stories, many of which were later adapted for stage, screen or TV. He was also well-known as a writer of songs both comic and bittersweet, many still standards today: "Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington", "Forbidden Fruit", "20th Century Blues", "Mad About the Boy", "If Love Were All", "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," as well as many others. By the time Coward was knighted in 1970, most of his work was behind him, but he had not become "old hat." A legend in his own lifetime, he was feted, his works were constantly revived and his bon mots quoted (and misquoted) up to and beyond his death in 1973.