Partner Bernard Miller
Anthony Creighton (1922, Swanage – 22 March 2005), a British actor and writer, is best known as the co-author of the play Epitaph for George Dillon with John Osborne.[1] 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.
Anthony Creighton was born at Swanage in the spring of 1922. His parents separated while he was still young and he was brought up by his mother, Elsie. They moved about for some time before finally settling at a village near Saffron Walden, in Essex, from where his mother made a living buying antiques and selling them on to metropolitan dealers. In 1934 Anthony was taken to see John Gielgud play Hamlet, an experience that inspired him to become an actor. Details of his early life are vague, but it seems that, as a young man, he lived for a time in Canada and studied at McGill University, in Montreal. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and the RAF as a navigator in bombers, and was awarded a DFC for gallantry for saving the crew of his Halifax bomber over Hamburg. During the war he met Terence Rattigan who was then a wireless operator and air gunner. They appeared together in entertainment for fellow servicemen at RAF ground stations. After the war he completed a course at RADA and subsequently joined a company at Barnstaple in Devon. 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 in The Stage in 1949 offering actors no salary but a share of the profits was answered by John Osborne who joined the company in Ilfracombe. His company took their plays from village to village but enjoyed little success, they presented a summer residency at the Victoria Theatre on Hayling 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 was An 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, writer-director Bernard Miller, Tomorrow with Pictures which was produced at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1961. It was critically well received 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".
Later Creighton 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. Whatever else," Osborne wrote in 1964, "I have been blessed with God's two greatest gifts: to be born English and heterosexual." But Creighton's claims seemed to be backed up by a series of letters from Osborne, sent to him in the 1950s when both men were jobbing actors sharing a houseboat in Chiswick, west London. Whenever he went off to work in repertory, Osborne would write regularly, and extracts from the letters seemed to indicate that Osborne and Creighton, whom he affectionately called "Mouse", had a tender and loving relationship. "My love for you," Osborne wrote in 1954, "is deeper than I could bear to tell you to your face. It is so strong and indestructible. Never be in doubt about either this or my loyalty." According to Creighton, the two men were involved in an on-off affair throughout the 1950s, during two of Osborne's five marriages. "It was a love affair," Creighton said in 1995, "a good, happy, mutually supportive and enduring relationship." In 2001 the University of Texas, which had bought Creighton's 122 letters from Osborne, made them available to the public. Not only did they reveal much of the emotional fury behind Osborne's "angry young man" stance, but they also showed the playwright's unusual tenderness for Creighton. "Don't let this horrify you," Osborne wrote in 1951 of his marriage to Miss Lane, "I know that the word marriage probably seems like the end of everything to a very lonely Mouse. Your place in my heart has never seemed so real, secure or assured. Nothing can knock down this unique relationship, we have created something very fine and splendid." Whatever the nature of their friendship, Creighton exposed a hitherto unseen side to Osborne. Osborne himself had been happy to admit that it was Creighton who had inspired Epitaph for George Dillon with his description of working as a night-time operator at the telephone exchange. Moreover, Osborne wrote, "critics were to point out that someone called Anthony Creighton has imposed a discipline on me which I had been unable to exercise on myself in the writing of Look Back In Anger". Osborne's great affection, even if platonic, for a homosexual man, casts much of his work in a new light, particularly A Patriot for Me, his dramatisation of the life of a blackmailed homosexual in the Austro-Hungarian army in the 1900s. "I think people should be able to appreciate," said Creighton in 1995, "that Patriot for Me, which stigmatises homosexuality, is a projection of his own self-hatred." Creighton finally admitted in an interview with Osborne's biographer, John Heilpern, that he had lied to de Jongh and no homosexual relationship had ever existed.[2]
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