Who was John Osborne?
Several people. His mother was a barmaid, wonderfully common, a character herself, and his father an advertising copyist and commercial artist who took his son to the theatre and music hall. By some wartime fluke Osborne was sent to a private school. Here he got his characters mixed, turning up in the kind of loud-checked suit favoured by Max Wall, his hero at the time, instead of uniform. He was later expelled for hitting the headmaster, did not go to university, and became an actor. So, a hybrid sort of background. As a result of these experiences and his immense linguistic gifts, both on and off the stage Osborne could “do the voices”. He pulled off the angry young man character in the first part of his life brilliantly. Jimmy Porter/Osborne is not just some youthful lefty, all anti-Suez and social resentment: he is a man of no fixed qualities, ill at ease in his skin and not knowing what skin he should be in. For all his modernity he is a bit of a sucker for honey-for-tea England a
