He died in the late afternoon at his summer home in Montauk, a seaside fishing hamlet on the eastern tip of Long Island, after suffering a short illness to which he apparently succumbed, Albee’s assistant, Jakob Holder, told Reuters.
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Victor of three Pulitzer Prizes, Albee is famous for his work Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Albee was the last of the great playwrights of the 20th century, earning his place next to Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.
Albee leaves behind a legacy of genre-defying plays like “A Delicate Balance”, “Three Tall Women” and “Seascape”, but he is perhaps best known for penning the acerbic and foul-mouthed for its time drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”. In more than 30 plays, Albee skewered such mainstays of American culture as marriage, child-rearing, religion and upper-class comforts.
The play ran for over 18 months on Broadway and went on to be adapted into a film in 1966 directed by Mike Nichols starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The Pulitzer Prize committee recommended it for best play that year, but the Pulitzer board rejected the recommendation.
USA Today reports that before undergoing surgery several years ago, Albee wrote a note he wanted published at the time of his death.
Many of his productions in the years after “Seascape” were savaged by the press as inconsequential trickery, a shadow of his former works.
“Edward Albee can be trusted as a bartender, an unleasher of tirades of aggression, a put-down comedian, and a lover of English whose sentences curl with the involuted beauty of a sea shell, but when he puts on his thinking cap, he is a poseur”, TIME wrote. The scathing drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” shocked audiences when it opened on Broadway in 1962.
Albee was born in 1928 in Washington, D.C., and was adopted by a wealthy family involved in the entertainment business. And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf who’s … afraid of living life without false illusions. He is predeceased by his longtime partner, sculptor Jonathan Thomas.
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“With any luck, there will be people standing up, shaking their fists during the performance and throwing things at the stage”, Albee told Steven Drukman in Interview magazine.
