1. Bonnie Greer, OBE FRSL was born on 16 November 1948 and is an American and British playwright, novelist, critic and broadcaster, who has lived in the UK since 1986.
25 Facts About Bonnie Greer
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Bonnie Greer has appeared as a panellist on television programmes such as Newsnight Review and Question Time and has served on the boards of several leading arts organisations, including the British Museum, the Royal Opera House and the London Film School.
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Bonnie Greer is former Chancellor of Kingston University in Kingston upon Thames, London.
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Bonnie Greer's father was born to a family of Mississippi sharecroppers.
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Bonnie Greer was stationed in Britain during World War II and took part in the D-Day landings.
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Bonnie Greer visited Scotland as part of a production at the Edinburgh Festival in 1986 and has been based in Britain since then.
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Bonnie Greer told The Sunday Times in 2006 that she owes her life to the move.
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Bonnie Greer has worked mainly in theatre with women and ethnic minorities, and is a former Arts Council playwright in residence at the Soho Theatre and for Nitro, previously known as the Black Theatre Co-operative and now called NitroBeat.
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Bonnie Greer has played Joan of Arc at the Theatre Atelier in Paris.
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Bonnie Greer has written radio plays for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, including a translation of The Little Prince.
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Bonnie Greer's plays include Munda Negra, concerning the mental health problems of black women, Dancing on Blackwater and Jitterbug, and the musicals Solid and Marilyn and Ella.
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The latter work began as a radio play broadcast in December 2005 after Bonnie Greer watched a documentary on Marilyn Monroe which mentioned Monroe's assistance to the jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald as segregation prevented the singer from working at certain venues, especially the Mocambo nightclub.
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Bonnie Greer is the author of two novels, Hanging by Her Teeth and Entropy, and is working on a play for the National Theatre Studio.
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Bonnie Greer was a regular contributor to BBC Two's Newsnight Review, and has been a panelist on the BBC's Question Time programme.
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Bonnie Greer appeared on the edition in October 2009 that featured Nick Griffin, then leader of the British National Party.
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Bonnie Greer was formerly director of the Talawa Theatre Company and has served on the boards of the Royal Opera House and the London Film School.
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Bonnie Greer is a former theatre critic for Time Out magazine.
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Bonnie Greer is currently working on a novel about Rossetti.
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Bonnie Greer is a member of the Arts Emergency Service, a British charity working with 16- to 19-year-olds in further education from diverse backgrounds.
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Bonnie Greer is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women in the UK.
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Bonnie Greer is a board member of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society.
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Bonnie Greer resigned in June 2015, following internal disagreements about the society's direction.
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Bonnie Greer is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
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Bonnie Greer appears in the Sky Arts TV programme Discovering Film, as one of its leading movie experts celebrating the lives and work of some of the most prolific and iconic Hollywood stars, and comments frequently about members of the British Royal Family on various ITN documentaries such as Channel 4's Charles: Our New King.
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Bonnie Greer was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2010 Birthday Honours for services to the Arts.