Waiting for Godot Feelings ran high and the opposition, led by Sir Malcolm Sargent, threatened to resign if "Godot" won [The Best New Play category]. An English compromise was worked out by changing the title of the award. "Godot" became The Most Controversial Play of the Year. It is a prize that has never been given since." In the Australian premiere at the Arrow Theatre in Melbourne in 1957, Barry Humphries played Estragon opposite Peter O'Shaughnessy's Vladimir. Although not his favourite amongst his plays, "Waiting for Godot" was the work which brought Beckett fame and financial stability and as such it always held
Samuel Beckett 17 July 1989. Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease, Beckett died on 22 December. The two were interred together in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris and share a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett's directive that it should be "any colour, so long as it's grey". Beckett's career as a writer can be roughly divided into three periods: his early works, up until the end of World War II in 1945; his middle period, stretching from 1945 until the early 1960s, during which he wrote what are probably his best-known works; and