Ben Travers, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Ben Travers

English writer of plays, screenplays, novels, and three memoirs

Date of Birth: 12-Nov-1886

Place of Birth: Hendon, England, United Kingdom

Date of Death: 18-Dec-1980

Profession: screenwriter, novelist

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio


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About Ben Travers

  • Ben Travers CBE AFC (12 November 1886 – 18 December 1980) was an English writer.
  • His output includes more than twenty plays, thirty screenplays, five novels, and three volumes of memoirs.
  • He is best remembered for his long-running series of farces first staged in the 1920s and 1930s at the Aldwych Theatre.
  • Many of these were made into films and later television productions. After working for some years in his family's wholesale grocery business, which he detested, Travers was given a job by the publisher John Lane in 1911.
  • After service as a pilot in the First World War, he began to write novels and plays.
  • He turned his 1921 novel, The Dippers, into a play that was first produced in the West End in 1922.
  • His big break came in 1925, when the actor-manager Tom Walls bought the performing rights to his play A Cuckoo in the Nest, which ran for more than a year at the Aldwych.
  • He followed this success with eight more farces for Walls and his team; the last in the series closed in 1933.
  • Most of the farces were adapted for film in the 1930s and 1940s, with Travers writing the screenplays for eight of them. After the Aldwych series came to a close, in 1935 Travers wrote a serious play with a religious theme.
  • It was unsuccessful, and he returned to comedy.
  • Of his later farces only one, Banana Ridge (1938), rivalled the runs of his 1920s hits; it was filmed in 1942.
  • During the Second World War Travers served in the Royal Air Force, working in intelligence, and later served at the Ministry of Information, while producing two well-received plays. After the war Travers's output declined; he had a long fallow period after the death of his wife in 1951, although he collaborated on a few revivals and adaptations of his earlier work.
  • He returned to playwriting in 1968.
  • He was inspired to write a new comedy in the early 1970s after the abolition of theatre censorship in Britain permitted him to write without evasion about sexual activities, one of his favourite topics.
  • The resulting play, The Bed Before Yesterday (1975), presented when he was 89, was the longest-running of all his stage works, easily outplaying any of his Aldwych farces.

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