John Osborne provincial touring company. Osborne tried his hand at writing plays, co-writing his first, "The Devil Inside Him", with his mentor Stella Linden, who then directed it at the Theatre Royal in Huddersfield in 1950. In June 1951 he also married Pamela Lane. His second play "Personal Enemy" was written with Anthony Creighton (with whom he later wrote "Epitaph for George Dillon" staged at the Royal Court in 1958). "Personal Enemy" was staged in regional theatres before he submitted "Look Back in Anger". Written in 17 days in a deck chair on Morecambe pier where Osborne was performing in a creaky
Look Back in Anger best remembered for, though, are Jimmy's tirades. Some of these are directed against generalised British middle-class smugness in the post-atomic world. Many are directed against the female characters, a very distinct echo of Osborne's uneasiness with women, including his mother, Nellie Beatrice, whom he describes in his autobiography "A Better Class of Person" as "hypocritical, self-absorbed, calculating and indifferent". Madeline, the lost love Jimmy pines for, is based on Stella Linden, the older rep-company actress who first encouraged Osborne to write. After the first production in London, Osborne began a relationship with Mary Ure, who played Alison; he divorced his