Shelagh Delaney

Shelagh Delaney (born November 25, 1939, Salford, Lancashire, England—died November 20, 2011, Suffolk) was a British playwright who, at age 19, won critical acclaim and popular success with the London production of her first play, A Taste of Honey (1958). Two years later Delaney received the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for the play’s New York City production.

By her own account, Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey after seeing a play by Terence Rattigan and deciding that she could write a better one. Set in England’s bleak industrial north country, the author’s birthplace, the play blends humour and pathos in its vivid account of an illegitimate pregnancy. In 1961 the play was adapted for film, with a screenplay by Delaney and the film’s director, Tony Richardson.

Delaney’s second play, The Lion in Love (1961), was received less favourably, and she produced a volume of short stories, Sweetly Sings the Donkey, in 1963. Thereafter she focused on the writing of screenplays, winning wide praise for Charlie Bubbles (1968) and Dance with a Stranger (1985), the latter a docudrama about murderer Ruth Ellis. Delaney’s third play, The House That Jack Built (1977), was first produced as a television series. In 1992 she wrote the screenplay for the made-for-television movie The Railway Station Man. She later wrote the radio plays Tell Me a Film (2003) and Country Life (2004).