According to his Albee’s personal assistant, the popular dramatist died after a short illness.
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The 1966 film adaptation, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, turned the play into Albee’s most famous work; it had, he wrote three decades later, “hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort really nice but a trifle onerous”.
Albees assistant was quoted as saying by BBC that he died on Friday at his home on Long Island near NY.
It was after that play that Albee began drawing comparisons to the likes of August Wilson, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. But then I got back into a feeling of usefulness..
After Albee’s initial series of successes – The Zoo Story, an off-Broadway hit in 1960; Virginia Woolf, which ran on Broadway for 19 months in 1962-64; and A Delicate Balance, which won the Pulitzer in 1967 – the playwright’s critics complained that his themes became abstruse, his symbols too heavy and his language too rarefied.
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.
Born March 12, 1928, Albee was the adopted son of theater owner Reed A. Albee and Frances Cotter-Albee, Reed’s third wife. His rejection of the family values and preference for an artistic lifestyle led to the clashes with his strong-willed mother that he chronicled in Three Tall Women, his most autobiographical work. But after Three Tall Women, a play he called an exorcising of demons, he had several major productions, including The Play About the Baby and The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? which won him his second Tony for best play in 2002.
In more than 25 plays Albee probed American culture, poking and prodding social mores with his shocking and sharp-tongued wit.
His most recent work was Me, Myself and I, which debuted in 2008.
Albee spent much of the 1950s writing poetry and fiction, before turning his hand to plays. In “The Goat or Who is Sylvia?” the main character falls in love with a goat.
Albee’s companion, the sculptor Jonathan Thomas, passed away in 2005. If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article.
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