Jeffrey Archer is a master storyteller, the author of novels which have all been worldwide bestsellers. He was born in 1940 and educated at Wellington School, Somerset and Brasenose College, Oxford. He wrote his first novel, Not a Penny More More, Not a Penny Less, in 1974. It achieved instant success. His other works include a few collections of short stories and ten novels, here are the titles:
Shall We Tell the President?
Kane and Abel
The Prodigal Daughter
First Among Equals
A matter of Hounour and other.
He was created a life peer in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 1992. He lived in Cambridge with his wife and two sons at the time.
Frederick Forsyth is the author of eight bestselling novels:
The Day of the Jackal
The Odessa File
The Dogs of War
The Devil’s Alternative and others.
His novel The Deceiver is now an International TV Series with screenplay written by Murray Smith.
He also wrote a short story collection. He has also collected together an anthology of flying tales, Great Flying Stories, which includes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Roald Dahl, Len Deighton, and H.D. Wells.
P.D. James was born in Oxford and educated at Cambridge High School. She works in the National Health Service, the police department of the Home Office. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She has won awards for crime writing from Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia, and has received honorary degrees from six universities. She was created a life peer in 1991. In 1997 she was Her novels include:
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
Innocent Blood
The Skull Beneath the Skin
Shroud for a Nightingale
A Certain Justice and others.
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English theatre
The United Kingdom has great theatre tradition. Theatre was introduced to the UK from Europe by the Romans and auditoriums were constructed across the country for this purpose.
By the medieval period theatre had developed with the mummers’ plays, a form of early street theatre associated with the Morris dance, concentrating on themes such as Saint George and the Dragon and Robin Hood. There were folk tales re-telling old stories, and the actors traveled from town to town performing these for their audiences in return for money and hospitality.
The medieval mystery plays and morality plays, which dealt with Christian themes, were performed at religious festivals.
The reign of Elizabeth I in the late 16th and early 17th century saw a flowering of the drama and all the arts. The most famous playwright in the world, William Shakespeare, wrote around 40 plays that are still performed in theatres across the world to this day.
The Elizabethan age is sometimes nicknamed ‘the age of Shakespeare’ for the amount of influence he held over the era. Other important Elizabethan and 17th-century playwrights include Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Webster.
The 18th century is known for its sentimental comedies, domestic tragedies and an overwhelming interest in Italian opera. Popular entertainment became more important in this period than ever before, with fair-booth burlesque forms that are the ancestors of the English Music Hall. These forms flourished at the expense of English drama, which went into a long period of decline.
A change came in the late 19th century with the plays on the London stage by the Irishmen George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, all of whom influenced domestic English drama and vitalised it again.
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Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (1856—1951) born in Dublin, acquired from his mother his early knowledge of music, especially opera, and painting. He was also well-read in Shakespeare, Bunyan, Shelly, Byron and Dickens. He started writing plays when he was about forty. His first plays aroused the interest of a very small enthusiastic audience and the censor, who banned his third play, Mrs. Warren's Profession (1892). In 1898, unwilling to accept the general neglect of his work, Shaw published two volumes of his plays, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, and these, together with the success of The Devil's Disciple in America and his marriage to an heiress, proved the turning point in his personal and economic fortunes.
During the sixty years of his life as a playwright he wrote a world of plays, among which the most famous are Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady), Caesar and Cleopatra, Heartbreak House, The Millionairess.
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Charlie Chaplin
Charles Spencer (1889—1977) is an English film actor and director. He made his reputation as a tramp with a smudge moustache, bowler hat, and twirling cane in silent comedies from the mid-1910-s, including “The Rink”, “The Kid”, and “The Gold Rush”. His later films combine dialogue with mime and music, as in “The Great Dictator”, and “Limelight”.
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Marylin Monroe
The stage name of Norma Jean Mortenson or Baker (1926-1962) is Marylin Monroe. This US film actress, the voluptuous blonde, sex symbol of the 1950s, made adroit comedies such as “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”, “How to Marry a Millionaire”, “Some Like it Hot” and many others. She often costarred with Clark Gable and Laurence Olivier. Among her friends were such high ranking people as the Kennedy brothers. Her third husband was the famous playwright Arthur Miller. In 1962 she committed suicide.
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Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman is a Swedish-born actress (1915-1982) who went to Hollywood to appear in David Selznick's Intermezzo in 1939 and later appeared in “Casablanca”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “Gaslight” (Academy Award). She projected a combination of radiance, refined beauty, and fortitude. For her role in the film “Murder in the Oriental Express” she was given Academy Award.
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Margot Fonteyn
Margot Fonteyn is the stage name of Peggy Margaret Hookham (1919— 1991), a famous English ballet dancer. She made her debut with the Vic-Wells Ballet in Nutcracker in 1934 and first appeared as Giselle in 1937, eventually becoming prima ballerina of the Royal Ballet, London. Renowned for her perfect physique, clear line, musicality, and interpretive powers, she created many roles in Frederick Ashton's ballets and formed a legendary partnership with Rudolf Nureyev.
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