Sir Noel Coward

Sir Noël Peirce Coward, a London-born playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, attended a dance academy as a child. He made his professional stage début at the age of eleven. At fourteen he ascended into the ranks of high society with help from a lover, Philip Streatfeild. (Streatfeild died in 1915.) As an adult, Coward developed a personal style that, as Time once put it, combined cheek and chic, pose and poise. Graham Payn began a personal and professional relationship with Coward in the mid-1940s and this continued until Coward’s death in 1973. Much of Coward’s career coincided with the acme of a British cultural movement that he deplored, “kitchen sink realism.” He once said of a play by one of the key figures in that movement, John Osborne, that it was “appalling from every point of view.” Coward’s own works include the three-act operetta “Bitter Sweet.”