William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's…
Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist whose 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman C…
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890…
Susanna Kaysen is an American author best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted, based on her experiences at McLean Hospital. Born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she is the daughter of econo…
Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Pete…
Yasmina Reza began work as an actress, appearing in several new plays as well as in plays by Molière and Marivaux. In 1987 she wrote Conversations after a Burial, which won the Molière Award for Best …
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. A seminal theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturg…
Sarah Kane was an English playwright. Her plays deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensit…
Peter Brook is a world-renowned theater director, staging innovative productions of the works of famous playwrights. A native of London, he has been based in France since the 1970s.
Sir Michael Caine, CBE was born Maurice Joseph Micklewaite near Elephant and Castle in South London. His first major starring roles, beginning in the 1960s, include 'Zulu,' 'The Ipcress File,' and 'Al…
Sidney Lumet was an Academy Award-winning American film director, with over 50 films to his name, including the critically acclaimed 12 Angry Men (1957), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Netw…
David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
KEITH JOHNSTONE is one of the few internationally recognized authorities in the field of improvisation, great chunks of which he created, including improvisation forms that include Theatresports™, Mae…
Lee Strasberg was an Academy Award nominated Austro-Hungarian-American director, actor, producer, and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre…
Before becoming a playwright, Jean-Claude Grumberg held several jobs, including working as a tailor. This work provided the setting for his best-known play, L'Atelier. He discovered drama as an actor …
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of h…
