Profiles

The only collection of Tynan's star-studded profiles, selected and edited by his widow and biographer, Kathleen Tynan, with a foreword by Simon Callow.

Kenneth Tynan was the 20th century's most influential writer on theatre and performance. Over the course of his life he wrote a series of brilliant and incisive pen-portraits of many of the most significant performers and writers of his day.

Amongst the fifty assembled here are profiles of actors such as Garbo, Bogart, Cagney, Olivier and Gielgud; the directors George Cukor, Peter Brook and Joan Littlewood; writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; and comedians as diverse as Mel Brooks, Eric Morecambe, W.C. Fields and Lenny Bruce.

'We had thought to have seen the last of Tynan. Now, suddenly, a new volume appears: a collection of fifty profiles of the famous... More than a third of the pieces are new - at least in book form - which in itself is cause enough for dancing... One does not have to like theatre to cherish these pieces... It is a book to savour in small doses, the better to postpone the sadness of reaching its end' Hugh Leonard

'Tynan was unique in that he combined the soul of an artist with the descriptive skill of a journalist... He was an ideal profile writer, as this book eloquently testifies' Michael Billington, Guardian

Kenneth Tynan was born in April 1927 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, which he left to become drama critic of the Evening Standard in 1951. He moved to the Observer in 1954, where he wrote on theatre every week until he left in 1962 to join Laurence Olivier's new National Theatre as its Literary Manager - and later Consultant. He died in July 1980. A selection of his Theatre Writings is published by Nick Hern Books. Also published since his death are his Diaries and Letters.