--- name: "John Osborne" canonical: "https://film.one/person/john-osborne" fi1m_id: "john-osborne" imdb_id: "nm0651570" tmdb_id: 33323 wikidata_id: "Q313841" roles: ["Actor"] born: "12 December 1929" died: "24 December 1994" reviewed_on_fi1m: 3 average_fi1m_score: 78 average_as: "actor" average_over: 2 updated: "2026-10-04T04:28:55.236008+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # John Osborne ## Identity John Osborne - **Canonical:** https://film.one/person/john-osborne - **Type:** Person - **Fi1m ID:** john-osborne - **IMDb ID:** nm0651570 - **TMDB ID:** 33323 - **Wikidata ID:** Q313841 - **Same entity:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Osborne, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q313841, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0651570/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/33323 Actor. Born 12 December 1929 in Fulham, London, England. Died 24 December 1994. ## Details - **Work:** Actor - **Born:** 12 December 1929, Fulham, London, England - **Died:** 24 December 1994 - **Active:** 1963–1980 - **Titles on Fi1m:** 3: 2 acting, 1 writing - **Frequently works with:** [Mike Hodges](https://film.one/person/mike-hodges.md) - **Academy Awards:** 1 Oscar (1 won) - **Average Fi1m score:** 78, as actor, over 2 titles - **Fi1m score by decade:** 1960s 74 (1), 1970s 86 (1), 1980s 70 (1) - **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Osborne, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q313841, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0651570/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/33323 ## Streaming the US now - **HBO Max:** [*Tom Jones*](https://film.one/film/tom-jones.md) (74) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on John Osborne > John Osborne's acting, in the films we have reviewed, comes to two small parts for Mike Hodges, a crime boss and a priest. The screen career that matters is the one he wrote, and *Tom Jones* shows how good it was and where it ran out. John Osborne appears in two Mike Hodges films nine years apart, and both times as a man with authority over everyone around him: Cyril Kinnear, the crime boss, in *Get Carter* (1971), and an Arborian priest in *Flash Gordon* (1980). Our reviews of both films do not mention him, which tells you the size of the parts. What he brought was the name. By 1971 the name was *Look Back in Anger*, the 1956 Royal Court play that put a raging, articulate young man on stage and changed what British plays sounded like, and a playwright of that standing sitting in a gangster film is a small joke the film does not need to explain. The screen career that counts was written, not acted. He and Tony Richardson founded Woodfall Film Productions in 1958 and filmed his own plays, *Look Back in Anger* (1959) and *The Entertainer* (1960), the latter written for Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice. Then in 1963 the two of them left the bedsits behind and made *Tom Jones*, which took Fielding's 1749 novel and turned it into the noisiest costume film of its decade. For ninety minutes it is funny, handsome and full of life, and the life is in the writing as much as in Walter Lassally's light. Then it goes to London and we felt it slow down under us, and the slowing is partly Osborne's doing. Fielding's last third is thick with plot, and he keeps most of it: Lady Bellaston, Lord Fellamar, a masquerade, a duel. A film that had been leaping from field to field has to stop and explain, and explaining was never his gift. His plays run on the tirade, the long self-lacerating speech a man delivers because nobody will interrupt him, from Jimmy Porter to the disintegrating solicitor of *Inadmissible Evidence* (1964). Exposition is the opposite of a tirade. It needs the writer to get out of the way, and Osborne never much liked getting out of the way. The later work bears that out. *A Sense of Detachment* (1972) and *Watch It Come Down* (1976) were received as self-indulgent, and the man who had been at the centre of British theatre in the fifties and sixties spent the following decades at its edge, writing television plays and two volumes of autobiography, *A Better Class of Person* (1981) and *Almost a Gentleman* (1991). He knew it. "It’s a mistake to stick around too long," he wrote in a letter about his later career. We would not send anyone to *Get Carter* or *Flash Gordon* for Osborne; see the first for Michael Caine and Hodges, the second for Max von Sydow and the costumes. See *Tom Jones* for the first hour and a half, and listen to how the lines sit in the actors' mouths, because that is the Osborne that matters on screen. The small parts are a famous writer's afternoons off. ## Biography John Osborne was an English playwright, screenwriter and actor. Born in Fulham, London, on 12 December 1929, he died on 24 December 1994. His 1956 play *Look Back in Anger* transformed English theatre. He wrote screenplays for the films *Tom Jones* (1963) and *The Charge of the Light Brigade* (1968), and adaptations including *The Entertainer* (1960). He also appeared as an actor in films such as *Get Carter* (1971), in which he played Cyril Kinnear, and *Flash Gordon* (1980). *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (3) ### Performed in (2) — the average rests on these - *Flash Gordon* (1980), Fi1m 70, as Arborian Priest — [page](https://film.one/film/flash-gordon.md) - *Get Carter* (1971), Fi1m 86, as Kinnear — [page](https://film.one/film/get-carter.md) ### Wrote (1) - *Tom Jones* (1963), Fi1m 74, Screenplay — [page](https://film.one/film/tom-jones.md) ## Complete filmography (34) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *Branagh Theatre Live: The Entertainer* (2016), Writer - *England, My England* (1995), Writer - *The Entertainer* (1993), Writer, Theatre Play - *Look Back in Anger* (1989), Writer - *God Rot Tunbridge Wells!* (1985), Writer - *Colonel Redl* (1985), Screenplay - *A Better Class of Person* (1985), Narrator, Writer - *Hedda Gabler* (1981), Adaptation - *Very Like a Whale* (1981), Writer - *Flash Gordon* (1980), as Arborian Priest — Fi1m 70, [page](https://film.one/film/flash-gordon.md) - *Look Back in Anger* (1980), Writer - *You're Not Watching Me, Mummy* (1979), Writer - *Tomorrow Never Comes* (1978), as Lyne - *Supernatural* (1977), series, as Edward Manners - *Almost a Vision* (1976), Writer - *The Gift of Friendship* (1974), Writer - *Luther* (1974), Writer - *Ms or Jill and Jack* (1974), Writer - *Get Carter* (1971), as Kinnear — Fi1m 86, [page](https://film.one/film/get-carter.md) - *The Hotel in Amsterdam* (1971), Writer - *First Love* (1970), as Maidanov - *The Right Prospectus* (1970), Writer - *ITV Saturday Night Theatre* (1969), series, Writer - *Inadmissible Evidence* (1968), Writer - *The Charge of the Light Brigade* (1968), Writer - *Luther* (1968), Writer - *The Parachute* (1968), as Werner Roger - *ITV Playhouse* (1967), series, Writer - *BBC Play of the Month* (1965), series, as Werner Roger · Writer - *Thirty-Minute Theatre* (1965), series, as Harry Steadman - *Tom Jones* (1963), Screenplay — Fi1m 74, [page](https://film.one/film/tom-jones.md) - *A Subject of Scandal and Concern* (1960), Writer - *The Entertainer* (1960), Screenplay, Theatre Play - *Look Back in Anger* (1959), Theatre Play, Additional Dialogue ## Gallery - ![53 Caithness Road, Hammersmith, London, W14 0JD. JOHN OSBORNE 1929–1994 Playwright lived here in a ground floor flat 1951–1955 (2021)](https://film.one/media/person/59636/gallery-60b025b14537.jpg) 53 Caithness Road, Hammersmith, London, W14 0JD. JOHN OSBORNE 1929–1994 Playwright lived here in a ground floor flat 1951–1955 (2021) — Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/JOHN_OSBORNE_-_53_Caithness_Road%2C_Hammersmith%2C_London%2C_W14_0JD.jpg/1280px-JOHN_OSBORNE_-_53_Caithness_Road%2C_Hammersmith%2C_London%2C_W14_0JD.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) - ![Blue plaque erected 8th May 2021 by English Heritage at 53 Caithness Road, Hammersmith, London, W14 0JD, London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. "JOHN OSBORNE](https://film.one/media/person/59636/gallery-45889fce7beb.jpg) Blue plaque erected 8th May 2021 by English Heritage at 53 Caithness Road, Hammersmith, London, W14 0JD, London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. "JOHN OSBORNE — Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/JOHN_OSBORNE_1929%E2%80%931994_Playwright_lived_here_in_a_ground_floor_flat_1951%E2%80%931955.jpg/1280px-JOHN_OSBORNE_1929%E2%80%931994_Playwright_lived_here_in_a_ground_floor_flat_1951%E2%80%931955.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) - ![Grave of John Osborne and his fifth wife in St George's churchyard, Clun, Shropshire, UK. (2009)](https://film.one/media/person/59636/gallery-6ad4e54defcc.jpg) Grave of John Osborne and his fifth wife in St George's churchyard, Clun, Shropshire, UK. (2009) — Nabokov (talk). Required citation is "Photo by Tom Oates, 2009", CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/JohnOsborne.jpg/1280px-JohnOsborne.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) - ![Press Photo of John Osborne in 1970 (cropped : see source)](https://film.one/media/person/59636/gallery-4df1d2dc305e.jpg) Press Photo of John Osborne in 1970 (cropped : see source) — MGM, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/John_Osborne_1970.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled) - ![John Osborne](https://film.one/media/person/59636/gallery-78d9d5c7fb16.jpg) John Osborne — Reginald gray, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/John_Osborne_by_Reginald_Gray.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled) ## Awards ### Academy Awards — 1 won - 1964: Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay (won), for *Tom Jones* ### BAFTA Film Awards — 1 won - 1964: Best British Screenplay (won), for *Tom Jones* ### Other awards — 1 won, 1 nominated - Tony Award for Best Play 1964: Tony Award for Best Play (won), for *Luther* - Tony Award for Best Play 1958: Tony Award for Best Play (nominated), for *Look Back in Anger* *From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.* --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/john-osborne