83 Facts About Noel Coward

Sir Noel Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".

Noel Coward achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards.

Noel Coward composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theatre works, screenplays, poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Noel Coward volunteered for war work, running the British propaganda office in Paris.

Noel Coward worked with the Secret Service, seeking to use his influence to persuade the American public and government to help Britain.

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Noel Coward won an Academy Honorary Award in 1943 for his naval film drama In Which We Serve and was knighted in 1969.

Noel Coward's plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture.

Noel Coward did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality, but it was discussed candidly after his death by biographers including Graham Payn, his long-time partner, and in Coward's diaries and letters, published posthumously.

Noel Coward was born in 1899 in Teddington, Middlesex, a south-western suburb of London.

Noel Coward's parents were Arthur Sabin Coward, a piano salesman, and Violet Agnes Coward, daughter of Henry Gordon Veitch, a captain and surveyor in the Royal Navy.

Noel Coward was the second of their three sons, the eldest of whom had died in 1898 at the age of six.

Noel Coward's father lacked ambition and industry, and family finances were often poor.

Noel Coward was bitten by the performing bug early and appeared in amateur concerts by the age of seven.

Noel Coward attended the Chapel Royal Choir School as a young child.

Noel Coward had little formal schooling but was a voracious reader.

Noel Coward played in the piece in 1911 and 1912 at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End.

In 1912 Noel Coward appeared at the Savoy Theatre in An Autumn Idyll and at the London Coliseum in A Little Fowl Play, by Harold Owen, in which Hawtrey starred.

Italia Conti engaged Noel Coward to appear at the Liverpool Repertory Theatre in 1913, and in the same year he was cast as the Lost Boy Slightly in Peter Pan.

Noel Coward reappeared in Peter Pan the following year, and in 1915 he was again in Where the Rainbow Ends.

In 1914, when Noel Coward was fourteen, he became the protege and probably the lover of Philip Streatfeild, a society painter.

Noel Coward continued to perform during most of the First World War, appearing at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1916 in The Happy Family and on tour with Amy Brandon Thomas's company in Charley's Aunt.

In 1918, Noel Coward was conscripted into the Artists Rifles but was assessed as unfit for active service because of a tubercular tendency, and he was discharged on health grounds after nine months.

Noel Coward began writing plays, collaborating on the first two with his friend Esme Wynne.

In 1920, at the age of 20, Noel Coward starred in his own play, the light comedy I'll Leave It to You.

Play ran for a month, after which Noel Coward returned to acting in works by other writers, starring as Ralph in The Knight of the Burning Pestle in Birmingham and then London.

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Nevertheless, The Manchester Guardian thought that Noel Coward got the best out of the role, and The Times called the play "the jolliest thing in London".

Noel Coward completed a one-act satire, The Better Half, about a man's relationship with two women.

In 1921, Noel Coward made his first trip to America, hoping to interest producers there in his plays.

Noel Coward absorbed its smartness and pace into his own work, which brought him his first real success as a playwright with The Young Idea.

In 1924, Noel Coward achieved his first great critical and financial success as a playwright with The Vortex.

Noel Coward, still having trouble finding producers, raised the money to produce the play himself.

Hay Fever, the first of Noel Coward's plays to gain an enduring place in the mainstream theatrical repertoire, appeared in 1925.

Noel Coward was turning out numerous plays and acting in his own works and others'.

Noel Coward ignored the doctors and sailed for the US to start rehearsals for his play This Was a Man; in New York he collapsed again, and had to take an extended rest, recuperating in Hawaii.

Noel Coward thrived during the Great Depression, writing a succession of popular hits.

In Private Lives, Noel Coward starred alongside his most famous stage partner, Gertrude Lawrence, together with the young Laurence Olivier.

Noel Coward disliked long runs, and after this he made a rule of starring in a play for no more than three months at any venue.

Design for Living, written for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, was so risque, with its theme of bisexuality and a menage a trois, that Noel Coward premiered it in New York, knowing that it would not survive the censor in London.

In 1933 Noel Coward wrote, directed and co-starred with the French singer Yvonne Printemps in both London and New York productions of an operetta, Conversation Piece.

Noel Coward next wrote, directed and co-starred with Lawrence in Tonight at 8.

Noel Coward's task was to use his celebrity to influence American public and political opinion in favour of helping Britain.

Noel Coward toured, acted and sang indefatigably in Europe, Africa, Asia and America.

Noel Coward wrote and recorded war-themed popular songs, including "London Pride" and "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans".

Noel Coward played a naval captain, basing the character on his friend Lord Louis Mountbatten.

Noel Coward's most enduring work from the war years was the hugely successful black comedy Blithe Spirit, about a novelist who researches the occult and hires a medium.

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Noel Coward toured during 1942 in Blithe Spirit, in rotation with his comedy Present Laughter and his working-class drama This Happy Breed.

Noel Coward's new plays after the war were moderately successful but failed to match the popularity of his pre-war hits.

Noel Coward owes little to earlier wits, such as Wilde or Labouchere.

Noel Coward's emerge with the staccato, blind impulsiveness of a machine-gun.

Noel Coward directed the successful 1964 Broadway musical adaptation of Blithe Spirit, called High Spirits.

Noel Coward argued that the primary purpose of a play was to entertain, and he made no attempt at modernism, which he felt was boring to the audience although fascinating to the critics.

In one of the three plays, A Song at Twilight, Noel Coward abandoned his customary reticence on the subject and played an explicitly homosexual character.

Noel Coward intended to star in the trilogy on Broadway but was too ill to travel.

The illustration captures how Noel Coward's image had changed by the 1960s: he was no longer seen as the smooth 1930s sophisticate, but as the doyen of the theatre.

Noel Coward was knighted in 1970, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Noel Coward received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 1970.

At the age of 73, Noel Coward died at his home, Firefly Estate, in Jamaica on 26 March 1973 of heart failure and was buried three days later on the brow of Firefly Hill, overlooking the north coast of the island.

In June 2021 an exhibition celebrating Noel Coward opened at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London.

Noel Coward was homosexual but, following the convention of his times, this was never publicly mentioned.

Noel Coward had a 19-year friendship with Prince George, Duke of Kent, but biographers differ on whether it was platonic.

Payn believed that it was, although Noel Coward reportedly admitted to the historian Michael Thornton that there had been "a little dalliance".

Noel Coward maintained close friendships with many women, including the actress and author Esme Wynne-Tyson, his first collaborator and constant correspondent; Gladys Calthrop, who designed sets and costumes for many of his works; his secretary and close confidante Lorn Loraine; the actresses Gertrude Lawrence, Joyce Carey and Judy Campbell; and "his loyal and lifelong amitie amoureuse", Marlene Dietrich.

From 1934 until 1956, Noel Coward was the president of the Actors Orphanage, which was supported by the theatrical industry.

Noel Coward became Collinson's godfather and helped him to get started in show business.

In 1926, Noel Coward acquired Goldenhurst Farm, in Aldington, Kent, making it his home for most of the next thirty years, except when the military used it during the Second World War.

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Noel Coward first settled in Bermuda but later bought houses in Jamaica and Switzerland, which remained his homes for the rest of his life.

Noel Coward was a witness at the Flemings' wedding, but his diaries record his exasperation with their constant bickering.

Noel Coward's distinctive clipped diction arose from his childhood: his mother was deaf and Noel Coward developed his staccato style of speaking to make it easier for her to hear what he was saying; it helped him eradicate a slight lisp.

Noel Coward wrote more than 65 plays and musicals and appeared in approximately 70 stage productions.

Rebellato rates Private Lives as the pinnacle of Noel Coward's early plays, with its "evasion of moral judgement, and the blur of paradox and witticism".

Noel Coward continued to push the boundaries of social acceptability in the 1930s: Design for Living, with its bisexual triangle, had to be premiered in the US, beyond the reach of the British censor.

Noel Coward toured them throughout Britain during the Second World War, and the first and third of them are frequently revived in Britain and the US.

Noel Coward's plays from the late 1940s and early 50s are generally seen as showing a decline in his theatrical flair.

Noel Coward's final plays, in Suite in Three Keys, were well received, but the Coward plays most often revived are from the years 1925 to 1940: Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit.

Noel Coward wrote the words and music for eight full-length musicals between 1928 and 1963.

Noel Coward later described it as "over-written and under-composed", with too much plot and too few good numbers.

Noel Coward persisted with a romantic historical theme with Pacific 1860, another work with a huge cast.

Noel Coward reverted, without success, to a romantic historical setting for After the Ball.

Noel Coward recalled "I had thought of a good title, Sigh No More, which later, I regret to say, turned out to be the best part of the revue".

Noel Coward was no fan of the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, but as a songwriter was nevertheless strongly influenced by them.

Symposium published in 1999 to mark the centenary of Noel Coward's birth listed some of his major productions scheduled for the year in Britain and North America, including Ace of Clubs, After the Ball, Blithe Spirit, Cavalcade, Easy Virtue, Hay Fever, Present Laughter, Private Lives, Sail Away, A Song at Twilight, The Young Idea and Waiting in the Wings, with stars including Lauren Bacall, Rosemary Harris, Ian McKellen, Corin Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave and Elaine Stritch.

On stage, characters based on Noel Coward have included Beverly Carlton in the 1939 Broadway play The Man Who Came to Dinner.

Noel Coward was an early admirer of the plays of Harold Pinter and backed Pinter's film version of The Caretaker with a £1,000 investment.