The three-time Pulitzer Prize victor passed away at his home in Montauk, New York on Friday (16Sep16) after a brief illness, according to his assistant Jackob Holder.
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Personal assistant Jackob Holder says Albee died Friday at his home on Long Island.
He burst onto the theater scene with “The Zoo Story” (1958) at age 30. The two-character drama, portraying disaffection and class struggle, premiered in Berlin the following year and then moved to off-Broadway in 1960.
In 1962, Albee’s Broadway debut, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a famously scabrous portrait of a withered marriage, won a Tony Award for best play.
1966: Actors (from left to right) Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal, Richard Burton (1925 – 1984) and Sandy Dennis in Mike Nichols” film of the Edward Albee play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’.
Although the stage version was selected by a Pulitzer Prize jury for the 1963 drama award, the Pulitzer advisory board overruled the jurors because of the play’s controversial nature.
The first, in 1967, was for “A Delicate Balance”. That was made into a 1973 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield.
His unconventional style won him great acclaim but also led to a almost 20-year drought of critical and commercial recognition before his 1994 play, “Three Tall Women”, garnered his third Pulitzer Prize.
In 2005 he was also awarded a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.
His adoptive parents, Reed and Francis Albee, were wealthy from businesses in vaudeville and motion pictures and changed his name to Edward Franklin Albee III, according to the Edward Albee Society. As a young man, the future author had a shaky academic history, getting expelled from both the Lawrenceville School, the Valley Forge Military Academy, and Trinity College.
Albee was a three-time victor of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the victor of three Tony Awards and in 1996 received the National Medal of Arts.
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That year saw the world premiere of his play about identical twins, “Me, Myself and I”, at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey; a NY revival of two of his early one-act classics, “The American Dream” and “The Sandbox”; and the premiere of “Edward Albee’s Occupant”, a piece about sculptor Louise Nevelson and the cult of celebrity. His works would eventually rank him alongside Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill in American drama.
