No L Coward Screenplays

This collection brings together three of Coward's most important screenplays – In Which We Serve (1942), Brief Encounter (1945) and The Astonished Heart (1950). The collection features the shooting scripts for each film alongside contextual notes for each play, and a general introduction, by Barry Day. In Which We Serve earned Coward an Academy Honorary Award in 1943 as well as the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Film. The film remains a classic of wartime British cinema. Brief Encounter, the most famous screenplay in this collection, is based on Coward's 1936 one-act play Still Life. It remains one of the greatest love stories of all time, coming second in a British Film Institute poll of the top 100 British films. The Astonished Heart tells the story of a psychiatrist's growing obsession for a good-time girl and the resulting tragedy this leads to. This collection features a foreword by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator Emeritus, Film, at New York's MoMA, and an eight-page black and white plate section of production stills.

I'm a happily married woman. Or rather I was until a few weeks ago. This is my whole world and it's enough, or rather it was until a few weeks ago. Your heart dances. The world seems strange and new. You want to laugh and skip and fall forever... You are in love. You are in love with the wrong person. Laura, the respectable suburban wife, and Alec, the idealistic, married doctor, meet in a station buffet, fall passionately in love but are doomed never to find fulfilment. David Lean's iconic 1945 movie, Brief Encounter, was written by Noel Coward and was based on one of his one-act plays, Still Life, written a decade earlier. Emma Rice, Artistic Director of Kneehigh Theatre Company, has adapted this timeless tale of joy and heartache for the stage, interspersing the romantic action with nine Coward ditties.

Full of witicisms, bons mots, and hidden gems from private papers.

The simple story of an unrequited love affair between a suburban doctor and a middle-class housewife, Brief Encounter is perhaps the most romantic film in the history of British cinema. Noel Cowards' screenplay conjures the drab, emotionally restrained world of post-World War II Britain better than almost any other literary text. This edition is being published to coincide with the centenary of Coward's birth and contains an illuminating Foreword on his work by his official biographer, Sheridan Morley.

The love and friendship between two married couples and best friends are put to the test when a postcard arrives with a picture of Capri on one side, and on the other, news of the imminent arrival of a certain handsome Frenchman.

I will ever be grateful for the almost psychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war.' Written in 1941, Blithe Spirit remained the longest-running comedy in British Theatre for three decades thereafter. Plotted around the central role of one of Coward's best loved characters, a spirit medium Madame Arcati (originally performed by Margaret Rutherford) Coward's play is an escapist comedy about a man whose two previous wives return to haunt him. "A minor comic masterpiece of the lighter sort" Professor Allardyce Nicoll

The eighth volume in the Coward Collection includes I'll Leave It To You and The Young Idea, the first of Coward's plays ever to be produced. These were, as he said, "enthusiastically acclaimed by the critics and ran five weeks and eight weeks respectively. In both of them I appeared with the utmost determination." This Was a Man, a slightly later play, was written in 1926, after the successes which made his name. It was originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain "for facetious adultery".