Terence Rattigan
100 Cornwall Gardens · master of the well-made play
Terence Rattigan was the most successful British playwright of the mid-century – The Winslow Boy, Separate Tables, and The Deep Blue Sea, whose drowning-in-despair heroine was first drafted around a man and drew on the suicide of one of Rattigan’s own former lovers.
Gay at a time when the stage could not say so plainly, he smuggled longing and concealment into apparently respectable drama. He lived at 100 Cornwall Gardens in Kensington. English Heritage’s blue plaque marks the flat.