Born in Virginia in 1928 and adopted at two weeks by a NY family with whom he never got along, Albee left home at a young age because they objected to his playwriting ambitions.
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Brantley says Albee believed that “theater should hold up a mirror to society – but not just a mimetic mirror – not just to show us what we have, but to show us what’s beneath, what’s to the side; to force us to look at things from another perspective”.
The famed American playwright died Friday at his Long Island home, according to his personal assistant Jackob Holder.
Considered one of the most important American playwrights of his time, Albee wrote a variety of intense, controversial plays diving into anxieties, disillusionments and death.
He later won the Pulitzer for Three Tall Women, A Delicate Balance and Seascape. The three-time Pulitzer Prize victor who penned Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The movie version starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Tributes to Edward Albee from actors, directors and writers are expected to air Sunday, Sept. 18 on both CBS’ Sunday Morning and NBC’s Today shows. “Maybe I’m being a little troublesome about this, but so many writers who are gay are expected to behave like gay writers and I find that is such a limitation and such a prejudicial thing that I fight against it whenever I can”, he said.
His best-known work, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a portrait of a decaying marriage set over one evening, was denied the 1963 Pulitzer Prize after debuting on Broadway the previous year. “I am a writer who is gay”, he said at the ceremony.
The 2000s saw a pair of major Broadway revivals of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
His wealthy father was the son of vaudeville theater magnate Edward Franklin Albee II.
Albee continued to write well into his later years.
The writer, who grew up in Westchester County N.Y, received a Tony for lifetime achievement in 2005.
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Albee, who was openly gay, had been in a longtime relationship with sculptor Jonathan Thomas, until his death in 2005.
