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George Bernard Shaw is a Actor and Scriptwriter British born on 26 july 1856 at Dublin (Irlande)

George Bernard Shaw

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Nationality United-kingdom
Birth 26 july 1856 at Dublin (Irlande)
Death 2 november 1950 (at 94 years) at Ayot St Lawrence (United-kingdom)
Awards Academy Award, Nobel Prize in Literature

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was a Nobel-Prize-winning British playwright, critic and passionate socialist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics stretched from the 1880s to his death in 1950. Originally earning his way as an influential London music and theater critic, Shaw's greatest gift was for the modern drama. He wrote more than 60 plays, among them Man and Superman, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Major Barbara, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Pygmalion. With his range from biting contemporary satire to historical allegory, Shaw became the leading comedy dramatist of his generation and one of the most important playwrights in the English language since the 17th century.

"Shaw was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since Swift, the most readable music critic in English, the best theatre critic of his generation, a prodigious lecturer and essayist on politics, economics, and sociological subjects, and one of the most prolific letter writers in literature," sums up Stanley Weintraub in the Encyclopædia Britannica. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925.

As a young man raised in poverty, Shaw embraced socialism and became an early and lifelong force in the Fabian Society, a highly influential British organisation, founded in 1884, to promote a gradual, as opposed to revolutionary, socialism, that was the foundation for the British Labour Party in 1900. He tirelessly wrote and spoke on behalf of its wide-ranging vision to transform British society, advocating a minimum wage for the working-class, universal healthcare, women's right to vote, pacifism and the abolition of hereditary privilege. He edited the classic text,"Fabian Essays in Socialism" (1889), and helped co-founders Sidney and Beatrice Webb create the London School of Economics and Political Science from a bequest by an early Fabian in 1895. He publicly opposed Britain's entry into both World Wars.

He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize (Literature, 1925) and an Academy Award (Best Adapted Screenplay, 1938), the first for his contributions to literature and the second for his film adaptation of his most popular play, Pygmalion. The story of a pedantic British linguist who turns a Cockney flower girl into a lady was immortalised after his death in the 1953 Broadway musical, My Fair Lady.

Shaw refused all other awards and honours, including the offer of a knighthood.

Biography

Shaw had avoided matrimony until his early 40s, when he met Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Anglo-Irish heiress and free-spirited feminist who had already rejected several aristocratic suitors in her determination not to be shackled to a conventional Victorian marriage. Befriended by one of the Fabian Society's founders, Beatrice Webb, Charlotte joined the society and created a scholarship for women at LSE. Beatrice introduced them in 1897, and though immediately attracted to each other, Shaw encouraged Charlotte's independence even after she proposed in a letter that July. But he eventually acquiesced and they married in 1898; both were in their early 40's. A vibrant rebel who shared Shaw's radical politics for social change, Charlotte became indispensable to Shaw's work: she deciphered his shorthand, learned to type, took dictation and helped him prepare his plays and articles for press. In 1906, the Shaws moved into a house, now called Shaw's Corner, in Ayot St. Lawrence, a small village in Hertfordshire, England; it was to be their home for the remainder of their lives, along with a pied a terre at 29 Fitzroy Square in London.

Though quite possibly their marriage was technically unconsummated, it was an enduring and affectionate one, and his wife's work was essential to the rest of his career. He managed a number of discreet affairs throughout his adult life, though his most famous crush, with the leading lady of the British stage, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, was also chaste, at her insistence; the two carried on a lengthy, torrid correspondence which Shaw refused to allow her to publish, for fear of hurting his wife.

Shaw's home, now called Shaw's Corner, in the small village of Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, is a National Trust property, open to the public.