18 Facts About Edward Knoblock

Edward Knoblock wrote numerous plays, often at the rate of two or three a year, of which the most successful were Kismet and Milestones.

Edward Knoblock lived most of his adult life in London, where he died in 1945 at the age of 71.

Edward Knoblock's father was a successful stockbroker with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

Edward Knoblock's father remarried in 1885 but died of acute appendicitis in 1886.

Edward Knoblock's American-born stepmother, who had attended music conservatory in Leipzig, took the children to Germany, where his older brother was already in school and where the cost of living was lower.

Edward Knoblock toured with William Greet's company in The Dovecot, an adaptation of a French comedy ; he managed the Avenue Theatre ; he appeared at the Royalty Theatre in November 1899 as Jo in the premiere of Shaw's You Never Can Tell, and was in the cast at the Adelphi Theatre in Laurence Irving's Bonnie Dundee.

Edward Knoblock's first dramatic work to be staged was a collaboration with Lawrence Sterner, a revised version of the latter's 1895 play The Club Baby, produced at the Avenue in May 1898, running for 39 performances.

Edward Knoblock claimed that in eighteen months he read five thousand plays, "and neither lost nor held up a single one of them".

Bennett had tried his hand as a dramatist before, with mixed success, but the combination of his gifts as a story-teller and Edward Knoblock's painstakingly acquired craftsmanship produced a critical and box-office success that made them both a great deal of money.

Laurence Irving is quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as saying that Knoblock taught Bennett, and later J B Priestley and others "the rudiments of stage carpentry".

Between the premiere of Milestones and the First World War Edward Knoblock had three more plays presented in London: Discovering America, ; The Headmaster ; and My Lady's Dress.

Edward Knoblock served as a captain in the Mediterranean, the Balkans and Greece.

Edward Knoblock's plays of the immediate post-war years were Our Peg ; Mumsie, Cherry, and One.

Edward Knoblock adapted The Three Musketeers in 1921, wrote the film Rosita for Pickford, and was a consultant for Fairbanks's 1922 Robin Hood and 1924 The Thief of Baghdad.

Edward Knoblock had two more collaborations with Bennett: London Life, an original play and Mr Prohack, a dramatisation of Bennett's 1922 novel of the same name.

Edward Knoblock's other plays of the 1920s were Simon; Called Peter ; Speakeasy ; and The Mulberry Bush.

Edward Knoblock was the subject of one of the most repeated stories involving the gaffe-prone actor John Gielgud, which Gielgud confessed was true.

Edward Knoblock died on 19 July 1945 aged 71, at the London home of his sister, the sculptor Gertrude Knoblauch.