Educating Rita Educating Rita Educating Rita is a stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell. It is a play for two actors set entirely in the office of an Open University lecturer. Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, "Educating Rita" premièred at The Warehouse, London, in June 1980 starring Julie Walters and Mark Kingston. The play was directed by Mike Ockrent. The plays follows the relationship between a 26-year-old Liverpudlian working class hairdresser and Frank, a middle-aged university lecturer, during the course of a year. In the play Frank has no surname, but when the film was made he became Dr. Frank
George Valentine (poet) George Valentine (poet) George Donald Valentine (1877-1946) was a Scottish sheriff, and writer of romantic-style short stories, plays and verse. He graduated from the University of Glasgow and was considered for Examinerships in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at both Glasgow and St Andrews Universities. G. D. Valentine wrote both under his own name and the pseudonym, George Henderland. Valentine's first published work was "The Heart of Bruce", a long poem, taken up by Alexander Gardner of Paisley in 1912. In the 1920s, two further original works, "Reasons of State" and "Saul: A Dramatic Poem" appearsed under the same imprint. It