Edward Albee, one of the most popular and influential American playwrights of the 20th century and victor of three Pulitzer Prizes, has died at 88 years old after a short illness.
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However, he struck gold in 1962 with his Broadway debut, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which landed him five Tony Awards, including Best Play, and is widely considered his finest work.
Albee died at his home in Montauk, New York after a short illness, according to his longtime personal assistant Jakob Holder.
“Maybe I’m a European playwright and I don’t know it”, he said in an interview with The Times in 1991, adding: “Just look at the playwrights who are not performed on Broadway now: Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Moliere, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett, Genet”.
Although the stage version was selected by a Pulitzer Prize jury for the 1963 drama award, the Pulitzer advisory board overruled the jurors because of the play’s controversial nature. The American writer had diabetes although no cause of his death was given.
No other details on his death were immediately available. He was honoured with the prestigious award for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975) and Three Tall Women (1994).
Playwright Edward Albee, who helped re-invent American theater with his cleverly biting dialogue and seering portayals of the human condition, died September 16, at his Montauk, N.Y. home, his publicist announced.
He added that some critics made erroneous assumptions about his work because he was gay, interpreting the two heterosexual couples portrayed in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as thinly veiled gay couples.
Born in the Washington, D.C. area in 1928, Albee was adopted by Rex Albee, son of Edward Franklin Albee II, founder of the company Keith-Albee-Orpheum that was eventually taken over by Joseph P. Kennedy, then sold to RCA and turned into the major movie studio RKO pictures. He left home as a young man and moved to Greenwich Village, holding various jobs to support himself while he worked at his writing.
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.
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Albee brought back “The Zoo Story” to startling effect in 2007 with “Edward Albee’s Peter and Jerry”. In 2005 he received a special Tony for lifetime achievement.
