Looking back in anger
Hilary Mantel, 21 November 1991
Almost a Gentleman. An Autobiography: Vol. II 1955-66
by John Osborne.
Faber, 273 pp., £14.99, November 1991,0 571 16261 4 Show More
by John Osborne.
Faber, 273 pp., £14.99, November 1991,
“... One of the more extraordinary revelations in A Better Class of Person, the first volume of John Osborne’s memoirs, was the fact that the author was proposed as the leading man in the 1948 film The Blue Lagoon. The teenage Osborne by his own account had a hollow chest and acne, and a loin cloth would not have shown these off to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston ... ”