Look Back in Anger (1959 film) Look Back in Anger (1959 film) Look Back in Anger is a 1959 British drama film starring Richard Burton, Claire Bloom and Mary Ure and directed by Tony Richardson. The film is based on John Osborne's eponymous play about a love triangle involving an intelligent but disaffected young man (Jimmy Porter) his upper-middle-class, impassive wife (Alison) and her snooty best friend (Helena Charles). Cliff, an amiable Welsh lodger, attempts to keep the peace. The character of Ma Tanner, only referred to in the play, is here brought to life by Edith Evans as a dramatic device to emphasise the class
John Osborne him he would like to make the play the fourth production to enter repertory. The play was directed by Tony Richardson and starred Kenneth Haigh, Mary Ure and Alan Bates. It was George Fearon, a part-time press officer at the theatre, who invented the phrase "angry young man". Fearon told Osborne that he disliked the play and feared it would be impossible to market. In 1993, a year before his death, Osborne wrote that the opening night was "an occasion I only partly remember, but certainly with more accuracy than those who subsequently claimed to have been present and, if