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. 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.
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Albee, regarded as the greatest playwright of his generation, was known for his candid and humorous works that skewered the underside of family, marriage, and American life.
Albee spent much of the 1950s writing poetry and fiction, before turning his hand to plays.
Albee won a string of awards for “Virginia Woolf”, including a Tony for best play in 1963.
Edward Albee, victor of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for drama, for his play “A Delicate Balance”, talks to reporters during a news conference. But after “Three Tall Women“, a play he called an “exorcising of demons”, he had several major productions, including “The Play About the Baby” and “The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?”, which won him his second Tony for best play in 2002.
Among his numerous other awards, Albee was the recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 1996, and in 2005, a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
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. He tried poetry and fiction before his first play, “The Zoo Story”, a one-act work about loneliness and class separation, was staged in 1959.
Albee also directed the American premieres of many of his own plays, starting with “Seascape” in 1975.
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The first, in 1967, was for “A Delicate Balance”. His long-time partner Jonathan Thomas died from cancer in 2005.
