Often bleakly humorous, his plays explored the darker sides of marriage, religion, raising children, and American life. According to his Albee’s personal assistant, the popular dramatist died after a short illness.
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Three times Pulitzer prize victor Edward Albee, author of Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf, has died at the age of 88.
Born Edward Harvey on March 12, 1928, in what some say was Virginia and others the United States capital Washington, Albee was given up for adoption shortly afterward. He made his Broadway debut in 1962, with the landmark, Tony-winning Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They became friends. “Two years passed, and I read that they’d hired Elizabeth Taylor to do Virginia Woolf”, Nichols recalled. He was honoured with the prestigious award for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975) and Three Tall Women (1994).
Albee had been arguably America’s greatest living playwright after the deaths of Arthur Miller and August Wilson in 2005. But he never wanted to be known as a ‘gay writer’.
The 2000s saw a pair of major Broadway revivals of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
But Albee was a fierce and committed advocate for writers who put his fame and reputation in the service of worldwide writers’ causes.
Considered one of the most important American playwrights of his time, Albee, entered the theater scene with “The Zoo Story” (1958) at age 30. He was 88. Albee once told the Paris Review that he decided at age 6 that he was a writer but chose to write plays after concluding he was not a very good poet or novelist.
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. He was awarded the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980 and in 1996 received the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts.
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Into his 70s, Albee continued to write provocative and unconventional plays. His longest relationship was with sculptor Jonathan Thomas, his partner from 1971 until Thomas’s death in 2005, notes The Washington Post.
