John Kingsley Orton, known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist.
27 Facts About Joe Orton
2.
Joe Orton was born on 1 January 1933 at Causeway Lane Maternity Hospital, Leicester, to William Arthur Orton and Elsie Mary Orton.
3.
Joe Orton's younger sisters Marilyn and Leonie were born in 1939 and 1944.
4.
Joe Orton attended Marriot Road Primary School but failed the eleven-plus exam after extended bouts of asthma, and so took a secretarial course at Clark's College in Leicester from 1945 to 1947.
5.
Joe Orton became interested in performing in theatre around 1949 and joined a number of dramatic societies, including the Leicester Dramatic Society.
6.
Joe Orton was accepted for a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in November 1950, and he left the East Midlands for London.
7.
Joe Orton met Kenneth Halliwell at RADA in 1951 and moved into a West Hampstead flat with him and two other students that June.
8.
Joe Orton wrote his last novel, The Vision of Gombold Proval, in 1959.
9.
Joe Orton later drew on these manuscripts for ideas; many show glimpses of his stage-play style.
10.
Joe Orton created the second self Edna Welthorpe, an elderly theatre snob, whom he later revived to stir controversy over his plays.
11.
Joe Orton chose the name as an allusion to Terence Rattigan's archetypal playgoer Aunt Edna.
12.
Joe Orton began writing plays in 1959 with Fred and Madge; The Visitors followed two years later.
13.
Joe Orton had completed Entertaining Mr Sloane by the time Ruffian was broadcast.
14.
Joe Orton sent a copy to theatre agent Peggy Ramsay in December 1963.
15.
Sloane tied for first in the Variety Critics' Poll for Best New Play and Joe Orton came second for Most Promising Playwright.
16.
The first draft was written from June to October 1964 and was called Funeral Games, a title Joe Orton dropped at Halliwell's suggestion but later reused.
17.
Joe Orton offered the play to Codron in October 1964 and it underwent sweeping rewrites before it was judged fit for the West End.
18.
Codron had manoeuvred Joe Orton into meeting his colleague Kenneth Williams in August 1964.
19.
Joe Orton, disputing director Peter Wood over the plot, produced 133 pages of new material to replace, or add to, the original 90.
20.
Joe Orton's growing experience led him to cut over 600 lines, raising the tempo and improving the characters' interactions.
21.
Joe Orton clashed with Marowitz, although the additional cuts they agreed to further improved the play.
22.
The Erpingham Camp, Joe Orton's take on The Bacchae, written through mid-1965 and offered to Associated-Rediffusion in October of that year, was broadcast on 27 June 1966 as the "pride" segment in their series Seven Deadly Sins.
23.
Joe Orton rewrote Funeral Games four times from July to November 1966.
24.
In 1970, The Sunday Times reported that four days before the murder, Joe Orton had told a friend that he wanted to end his relationship with Halliwell, but did not know how to go about it.
25.
John Lahr's biography of Joe Orton, entitled Prick Up Your Ears, was published in 1978 by Bloomsbury.
26.
Two archive recordings of Joe Orton are known to survive: a short BBC radio interview first transmitted in August 1967 and a video recording, held by the British Film Institute, of his appearance on Eamonn Andrews' ITV chat show transmitted 23 April 1967.
27.
In July 2019, Dr Emma Parker, professor at the University of Leicester and an Joe Orton expert, launched a campaign to install a statue of him in Leicester, the city of his birth.