Shelagh Delaney
born Nov. 25, 1939, Salford, Lancashire,
Eng.
British playwright who, at age 19, won
critical acclaim and popular success with
the London production of her first play, A
Taste of Honey (1958). Two years later,
Delaney received the Drama Critics’ Circle
Award for the play’s New York City
production.
By her own account, Delaney wrote A Taste
of Honey after seeing a play by Terence
Rattigan and deciding that she could write a
better one. Set in England’s bleak
industrial north country, the author’s
birthplace, the play blends humour and
pathos in its vivid account of an
illegitimate pregnancy. In 1961 the play was
adapted for film, with a screenplay by
Delaney and the film’s director, Tony
Richardson.
Delaney’s second play, The Lion in Love
(1961), was received less favourably, and
she produced a volume of short stories,
Sweetly Sings the Donkey, in 1963.
Thereafter she focused on the writing of
screenplays, winning wide praise for Charlie
Bubbles (1968) and Dance with a Stranger
(1985), the latter a docudrama about
murderer Ruth Ellis. Delaney’s third play,
The House That Jack Built (1977), was first
produced as a television series. In 1992 she
wrote the screenplay for the
made-for-television movie The Railway
Station Man.
