Peer Gynt Peer Gynt Peer Gynt (; ) is a five-act play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen published in 1867. Written in Danish—the common written language of Denmark and Norway in Ibsen's lifetime—it is one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays. Ibsen believed "Per Gynt", the Norwegian fairy tale on which the play is loosely based, to be rooted in fact, and several of the characters are modelled after Ibsen's own family, notably his parents Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg. He was also generally inspired by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's collection of Norwegian fairy tales, published in 1845 ("Huldre-Eventyr
Peer Gynt the Button Molder. In 1951, John Garfield fulfilled his wish to star in a Broadway production, featuring Mildred Dunnock as Åse. Sadly, this production was not a success, and is said by some to have contributed to Garfield's death at age 39. On film, years before he became a superstar, the seventeen-year-old Charlton Heston starred as Peer in a silent, student-made, low-budget film version of the play produced in 1941. "Peer Gynt", however, has never been given a full-blown treatment as a sound film in English on the motion picture screen, although there have been several television productions, and a