John Osborne, British Playwright, Dies at 65

John Osborne, the playwright whose 1956 drama "Look Back in Anger" changed the course of British theater and earned him a reputation as one of the most forceful voices among a new generation of rebellious postwar dramatists, died on Saturday in a hospital in Shropshire, England. He was 65.

Mr. Osborne had diabetes and had recently complained of being in poor health.

"Look Back in Anger" helped change the face of the British stage in the 1950's. The wrathful monologues of Jimmy Porter, its disagreeable and self-centered antihero, soon came to be regarded as an embodiment of Mr. Osborne's own profound rage and disillusionment.

When the play opened on Broadway in October 1957, with Kenneth Haigh, Mary Ure and Alan Bates in the leading roles, The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson found the play flawed but praised Mr. Osborne as "a fiery writer with a sharp point of view and a sense of theater." He also noted that "the British drama has for once said a long farewell to the drawing room."

Over four decades, critics ritually described Mr. Osborne as one of the angriest men in Britain, let alone the theater. Married five times, and with a reputation as a heavy drinker, he punctuated his life and career with frequent and highly public outbursts of wrath and vitriol aimed at a wide variety of targets, including newspaper columnists, other dramatists, homosexuals and even his mother and daughter.

"Disappointment was oxygen to them," he wrote of his family in "A Better Class of Person," one of his memoirs. "The grudge that was their birthright they pursued with passionate despondency to the grave." To his mother, he wrote, "hospitality was as unknown as friendship."

Only last year, Mr. Osborne was the object of fresh notoriety when he walked out of a ceremony after being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Writer's Guild of Great Britain.