George Bernard Shaw 1856 – 1950

Biography

George Bernard Shaw was the sharpest tongue in English theatre. The Dublin-born playwright wrote more than sixty plays — Man and Superman, Saint Joan, and Pygmalion, which later became My Fair Lady — mixing razor satire with big ideas about class, war, and human nature, and collecting the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature along the way. A critic, polemicist, and political agitator to the end, he dominated the stage for over half a century. He died of kidney failure on November 2, 1950, at 94, at his home, Shaw’s Corner in Ayot St Lawrence, where his ashes were scattered in the garden. He was also a vegetarian, a socialist, and a relentless letter-writer whose correspondence fills volumes. His plays are still staged around the world, and Pygmalion’s afterlife as My Fair Lady made him one of the few playwrights to conquer Broadway twice — once in his own words, once in song.