The son of a miner from Wakefield, Storey belonged to the same generation of actors and writers as Albert Finney, Shelagh Delaney, John Braine, Tom Courtenay and Alan Sillitoe, and like them often experienced something of a disconnect between the artistic world he found fame in and his roots, playing rugby league for the Leeds "A" team at weekends before returning to the Slade School of Art in London, a feeling memorably expressed by Courtenay in the entry from the diary he kept as a student at RADA for the day in 1959 when his hometown side Hull lost to Wigan in the Challlenge Cup Final: "Met Dad, went to Wembley. Played Chekhov in evening."
Tuesday, 28 March 2017
This Sporting Life
The playwright, screenwriter and novelist David Storey, who has died aged 83, epitomised the early 1960's realist "New Wave" in British film: Northern, working-class and newly self-confident.
The son of a miner from Wakefield, Storey belonged to the same generation of actors and writers as Albert Finney, Shelagh Delaney, John Braine, Tom Courtenay and Alan Sillitoe, and like them often experienced something of a disconnect between the artistic world he found fame in and his roots, playing rugby league for the Leeds "A" team at weekends before returning to the Slade School of Art in London, a feeling memorably expressed by Courtenay in the entry from the diary he kept as a student at RADA for the day in 1959 when his hometown side Hull lost to Wigan in the Challlenge Cup Final: "Met Dad, went to Wembley. Played Chekhov in evening."
The son of a miner from Wakefield, Storey belonged to the same generation of actors and writers as Albert Finney, Shelagh Delaney, John Braine, Tom Courtenay and Alan Sillitoe, and like them often experienced something of a disconnect between the artistic world he found fame in and his roots, playing rugby league for the Leeds "A" team at weekends before returning to the Slade School of Art in London, a feeling memorably expressed by Courtenay in the entry from the diary he kept as a student at RADA for the day in 1959 when his hometown side Hull lost to Wigan in the Challlenge Cup Final: "Met Dad, went to Wembley. Played Chekhov in evening."
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Loved the book This Sporting Life. Only partly because I was into Rugby League.
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