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Shelagh Delaney (born November 25, 1939), is a British playwright of Irish descent, best known for her debut work, A Taste Of Honey. Born in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, she attended three different primary schools. After failing the eleven-plus examination to qualify for grammar school, she went to Broughton Secondary School, where she saw her first stage production, an amateur performance of Shakespeare's Othello . She was twelve at the time and the play made a lasting impression. Delaney proved to be a late developer and she eventually transferred to the local grammar school where she had a record of fair achievement. She left school at seventeen for a succession of jobs in Salford, which included shop assistant, milk-depot clerk, and usherette. Her driving ambition was always to write. At age seventeen Delaney began A Taste of Honey as a novel, but soon realised that it would work better as a play. It focuses on a teen-aged working-class girl who refuses to conform to her dreary surroundings. The play portrays the lives of typical workers in the north of England in an inventive way. A Taste of Honey was accepted by Joan Littlewood, artistic director of the Theatre Workshop, who strongly believed that plays should be about ordinary people. It opened at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London on May 27, 1958, and on February 10, 1959, transferred to Wyndham's Theatre in the West End, where it enjoyed a long run and won several awards. On October 4, 1960, the play opened at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre with a cast including Joan Plowright, Angela Lansbury, and Billy Dee Williams. Two years later, Shelagh co-wrote with director Tony Richardson the screenplay for the film version, which starred Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan and won Delaney a BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay (along with Richardson). The film was one of the key films of the British New Wave of cinema in the Sixties. She has penned a collection of short stories entitled Sweetly Sings the Donkey, several television plays, including Did your Nanny Come from Bergen? (1970), and St Martin's Summer (1974), award-winning scripts such as Charley Bubbles and Dance with a Stranger, and radio plays such as So Does the Nightingale (1980), but has never attained the level of success she did with her first play. Her works have formed the inspiration for several songs written by the British singer/songwriter Morrissey, and she featured on the sleeves of the Louder Than Bombs album and Girlfriend in a Coma single by his band, The Smiths.
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