TVC E. American playwright Edward Albee’s obituary is out. Edward who died at age 88, has been described as both the first modern American playwright and the last great American playwright after Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.
In reality he was probably neither, although he was undoubtedly a substantial talent, who burst on to a stagnant American theatrical scene with The Zoo Story in 1959 and followed it up three years later with that major masterpiece of marital disharmony, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Although Albee was to continue writing all his life, and had minor success with plays such as the Pinteresque A Delicate Balance (1966) and All Over (1971), it was not until 1991 that he had a late creative blooming and another theatrical hit with Three Tall Women. Like much of Albee’s best work, Three Tall Women was strongly autobiographical, drawing on his privileged but loveless childhood and memories of his mother, Frances, a domineering, Junoesque beauty who preferred horses to people, and almost anyone to her adopted son.
He was born in Washington, to Louise Harvey, and immediately given up for adoption. Aged 18 days, he was handed into the care of Reed and Frances Albee, of Larchmont, New York. Reed was the wealthy, womanising son of the vaudeville theatre-owner and manager Edward Franklin Albee, and Frances (nee Cotter), better known as Frankie, was his third wife. It was rumoured that she had married Reed for his money. A childhood friend of Albee’s was subsequently to remark: “It’s lucky he was adopted. He would not get much talent from those two.”
