14 Facts About Kevin Elyot

Kevin Elyot was a British playwright, screenwriter and actor.

Kevin Elyot finished his final play, Twilight Song, not long before he died in 2014, which received a posthumous premiere at London's Park Theatre in 2017.

Kevin Elyot was born in the Birmingham suburb of Handsworth, West Midlands, England, on 18 July 1951.

Kevin Elyot studied at King Edward's School, Birmingham, where he acted the part of Desdemona, and sang in the third performance of Britten's "War Requiem".

Kevin Elyot sang in the Birmingham Cathedral choir as a treble.

Kevin Elyot cited a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon when he was around 10 years old, to see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard III starring Christopher Plummer and Eric Porter, as the "start of my love affair with the place", and afterwards he would take himself on the bus to Stratford to go to the theatre.

Kevin Elyot went to the University of Bristol and graduated with a Theatre Studies degree in 1973.

In 1992, Kevin Elyot created a new translation for the Royal Shakespeare Company of Alexander Ostrovsky's Artists and Admirers.

Kevin Elyot wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of My Night with Reg, which was again directed by Michell and featured the entire original Royal Court cast, and which premiered on 14 March 1997.

Kevin Elyot was continuing to build a successful career as a screenwriter, which by now included episodes of Agatha Christie's Poirot and Agatha Christie's Marple.

Kevin Elyot's last stage play was a new version of Christie's And Then There Were None in 2005, which opened directly in the West End at the Gielgud Theatre.

Kevin Elyot's final television film was an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's autobiography, Christopher and His Kind, which tells the story of Isherwood's years living in hedonistic Weimar Berlin in the early 1930s.

Kevin Elyot died while preparations were under way for the Donmar Warehouse's 2014 revival of My Night with Reg, and shortly after completing Twilight Song, his first original stage play since 2004's Forty Winks.

Kevin Elyot was openly gay and some of the plays he created were based on growing up as a young gay man, such as The Day I Stood Still.