Edward Albee, widely regarded by many as the most important American playwright, has died, aged 88. He passed away after a short illness at his home in Montauk, New York. No cause of death was publicly revealed, although he had suffered from diabetes.
The New York Times described Albee as "the foremost American playwright of his generation, whose psychologically astute and piercing dramas explored the contentiousness of intimacy, the gap between self-delusion and truth and the roiling desperation beneath the facade of contemporary life."
Albee’s companion, the sculptor Jonathan Thomas, passed away in 2005. “I couldn’t write for a long time,” Albee told the same newspaper in 2007. “The mourning never ends; it just changes. But then I got back into a feeling of usefulness.”
The success of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had shown the way for Albee, whose first produced play The Zoo Story opened in Berlin on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in 1959.
The playwright's Broadway debut was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? an unflinching portrait of an acrimonious marriage through one night-long drinking session. It won a Tony Award for best play, and ran for over eighteen months. The drama won five Tonys including best play, and Tonys for actor Arthur Hill and actress Uta Hagen. The 1966 film adaptation, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, won five Oscars, including best actress - Taylor - and supporting actress, Sandy Dennis.
“I don’t like the idea of getting older and older because there’s meant to be a time when that has to stop, " Albee once admitted. "Dying strikes me as being a great waste of time.” He actually penned a valedictory note years ago, which ran as follows. “To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love.”
Edward Albee pictured in England in the late sixties
Among a host of honours bestowed, the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to the playwright on three occasions. He won the award for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975) and the 1994 play, Three Tall Women.
The Play About the Baby was a huge success in 1996 and The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? won Albee his second Tony for Best Play in 2002. Moreover, Albee directed the American premieres of a number of his own plays, beginning with Seascape.
“It’s just a quirk of the brain that makes one a playwright,” Albee declared in 2008. “I have the same experiences that everybody else does, but ... I feel the need to translate a lot of what happens to me, a lot of what I think, into a play.”
“Each play of mine has a distinctive story to tell,” he declared in an interview with the Santa Fe New Mexican in May 2001. “What unites them all is that I’m trying to make people more aware of whether they’re living their lives fully or not.”
