- Anthony Creighton
Anthony Creighton (
Swanage ,1922 –March 22 2005 ) is best known as the co-author of the playEpitaph for George Dillon withJohn Osborne .He served in the
RAF during the war as a navigator on bomber aircraft. He was awarded the DFC for gallantry for saving the crew of his Halifax over Hamburg. During the war he metTerence Rattigan who was then a wireless operator and air gunner. They appeared together in entertainment for fellow servicemen at RAF ground stations. After the was he completed a course atRADA and subsequently joined a company atBarnstaple inDevon . Shortly afterward he formed his own travelling company, the Sage Repertory Group, with £200 given to him by his mother and was joined by three other actors from Barnstaple. An advertisement inThe Stage in 1949 offering actors no salary but a share of the profits was answered byJohn Osborne who joined the company inIlfracombe . His company took their plays from village to village but enjoyed little success, they presented a summer residency at the Victoria Theatre onHayling Island but this too was short-lived. Shortly after he collaborated on two plays with Osborne, the first 'Personal Enemy' fell foul of the censors at the time, the second wasAn Epitaph for George Dillon .Although Creighton had little other dramatic success, he remained a close friend and confidant of Osborne, and was living with him on a houseboat in the Thames in 1954, the year Osborne wrote "
Look Back in Anger ". Creighton is believed to have been the model for Cliff in the play.The friendship between Osborne and Creighton faded over time. In 1960 Creighton co-wrote another play with his American lover Bernard Miller, "Tomorrow with Pictures" which was produced at the Lyric in Hammersmith in 1961. It achieved little success and was to be Creighton's last produced play. Subsequently he taught drama at various London education establishments.
He met Osborne on one last occasion in 1994, at Osborne's country home, to discuss "George Dillon" royalty payments. Osborne was by then diagnosed as diabetic and a near shadow of his former self, he died shortly after the meeting. Creighton said of the melancholy visit that he would prefer to remember the impecuniously happier times of the 1950s, 'I look back on Osborne with love'.
In recent years, Creighton has attracted controversy for a different reasons. After Osborne's death in 1994, Creighton claimed in an interview with the critic Nicholas de Jongh that he and Osborne had lived together as lovers. Osborne's surviving family were quick to refute any suggestion of homosexuality on Osborne's part. Creighton's proximity to the
Angry Young Men of the 1950s and 1960s make his extensive collection of letters and diaries of considerable historical importance.
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