Edward Albee taught audiences to see society from a different perspective through his plays.
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It was later made into a 1966 black-comedy movie directed by Mike Nichols and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who won an Oscar as best actress.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama three times, for his plays “A Delicate Balance”, “Seascape,” and “Three Tall Women“. He observed that no one would describe Arthur Miller as a “straight playwright”.
Some LGBT people thought he was denying the importance of his identity and the need to create work specific to that identity.
Into his 70s, Albee continued to write provocative and unconventional plays.
Albee’s work could hit nerves like no other.
Albee was gay and an activist for LGBT rights.
Albee was adopted shortly after birth by a wealthy NY family that sent him to elite schools – two of which expelled him – but he had no desire for social status.
An unconventional student, Albee attended several schools, including The Choate School in Wallingford, Conn., from which he graduated in 1946, and Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., from 1946 to 1947.
He moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s, finding a more sympathetic environment in the avant-garde scene, where he wrote “The Zoo Story” that marked his breakthrough in theater. It was an Obie Award victor and put him on a path to the success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Albee was proclaimed the playwright of his generation after his blistering “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway in 1962. The first, in 2005, starred Kathleen Turner and a Tony-winning Bill Irwin, and the second, in 2012, featured Amy Morton and Tracy Letts and took home another Best Leading Actor Tony and the prize for Best Revival. In more than 25 plays Albee skewered such mainstays of American culture as marriage, child-rearing, religion and upper-class comforts. Albee died after a short illness, according to Holder.
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Speaking about the couple’s time together, Albee said there were “as close to a lifetime with someone as anybody gets”.
