His father, Horace Ayckbourn, was an orchestral violinist, at one time deputy leader of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Ayckbourn wrote his first play at Wisborough Lodge ( a preparatory school in the village of Wisborough Green ) when he was about 10.

Alan Ayckbourn said that his relationship with Christine became easy once they agreed their marriage was over.

Like his mother, neither he nor Christine sought a divorce for the next thirty years and it was only in 1997 that they formally divorced ; Ayckbourn married Heather Stoney.

One side-effect of the timing is that, as Alan was awarded a knighthood a few months before the divorce, both his first and second wife are entitled to take the title of Lady Ayckbourn.

Both characters feel themselves in trouble, and there was speculation that Alan Ayckbourn himself may have felt himself to be in trouble.

In the Plays and Players Yearbook for 1993 he was calculated as the third most performed playwright in the UK behind William Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn.

His mother was Marie Anne d ' Estrées († 1741 ), daughter Abigail Ayckbourn of Marshal Jean II d ' Estrées ( 1624 – 1707 ) and younger sister of Marshal Victor Marie d ' Estrées.

It was directed by Alan Ayckbourn and Michael Gambon gave an acclaimed performance as Eddie.

Skinner has worked with directors that include Mike Leigh, Trevor Nunn, Tim Burton and Sam Mendes, but she remembers one particular director, Alan Ayckbourn, when she started out: " He was a great influence for me as he pushed me so hard, but every director you work with has a big influence in some way, they really push you .”

Thompson was fired just before the opening, so Ayckbourn himself stepped into the fray, aided by choreographer Christopher Bruce.

The London première was at the proscenium Lyttelton Theatre on 4 October 1982, with Ayckbourn again directing.

However, a permanent home proved difficult to find and it was not until late 1988 and the closure of the local Odeon cinema by Rank Leisure that the theatre's long-standing Artistic Director, Alan Ayckbourn, found a suitable venue.

The 2011 college production was A Chorus of Disapproval by Alan Ayckbourn.

Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE ( born 12 April 1939 ) is a prolific English playwright.

She appeared as Madeline Bassett in the original London cast of the Andrew Lloyd Webber / Alan Ayckbourn musical Jeeves in 1975.

In the first ten years of his career he directed more than sixty productions in London and throughout the UK – from Alan Ayckbourn to Rene de Obaldia, and Pam Gems to Athol Fugard.

Ayckbourn attended Haileybury, in the village of Hertford Heath, and while there toured Europe and America with the school's Shakespeare company.

It is said that Joseph became both a mentor and father figure for Ayckbourn until his untimely death in 1967, and he has consistently spoken highly of him.

Although Ayckbourn continued to move where his career took him, he settled in Scarborough, eventually buying Longwestgate House, the house formerly owned by Stephen Joseph.

Ayckbourn, however, continues to write and direct his own work at the theatre.

Ayckbourn has frequently said he sees aspects of himself in all his characters.

But again, it is unclear whether this had any effect on the writing, and Paul Allen's view is that it is not current experience that Ayckbourn uses for his plays.

It could be that Ayckbourn had written plays with himself and his own issues in mind, but as Ayckbourn is portrayed as a guarded and private man, it is hard to imagine him exposing his own life in his plays to any great degree.

After an excursion into the world of comic-books and cartoons ( another of Resnais's enthusiasms ) in I Want to Go Home ( 1989 ), an ambitious theatrical adaptation followed with the diptych of Smoking / No Smoking ( 1993 ): Resnais, having admired the plays of Alan Ayckbourn for many years, chose to adapt what appeared the most intractable of them, Intimate Exchanges, a series of eight interlinked plays which follow the consequences of a casual choice to sixteen possible endings.

Gambon is a very private person, a " non-starry star " as Ayckbourn called him.

In addition to his many Shakespearean roles ( Jaques in As You Like It, Cassius in Julius Caesar, Polonius in Hamlet, Malvolio in Twelfth Night ), Hordern performed in plays by Strindberg, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pinero, Pinter, Dürrenmatt, Albee, Alan Ayckbourn, David Mercer and Tom Stoppard.

* In 1984 in the play ( and later film ) A Chorus of Disapproval by Alan Ayckbourn, an amateur production of The Beggar's Opera is a major plot driver and excerpts are performed.

The Ayckbourn Theatre is a fully functional modern theatre.

Important modern playwrights include Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckbourn, John Osborne, Michael Frayn and Arnold Wesker.

A 1993 survey for ' Plays and Players ' magazine cited Godber as the third most performed playwright in the UK, after Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn. In 2005 won 2 BAFTAs for ' Odd Squad ', written and directed on location in Hull and screened by BBC children's television.

Heidenstam was born in 1859, of a prosperous family.

Sherlock Holmes, the ancestor of all private eyes, was born during the 1890s.

Henrietta was discovering in the process of writing, as the born writer does, not merely a channel for the discharge of accumulated information but a stimulus to the development of the creative powers of observation, insight and intuition.

She was born Lilian Steichen, her parents immigrants from Luxemburg.

`` My mother read a book right after I was born and there was a Lilian in the book she loved and I became Lilian -- and eventually I became Paula ''.

By now she was sure she was going to have a baby, deciding it would be born in India or Burma that November.

He was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1909.

About the only time the Hetman seemed excited was when one of his own pet ideas was born.

On April 10, 1904, his first child was born, a son named George after the late Senator.

Modern warfare was born in this campaign -- periscopes, camouflage, booby traps, land mines, extended order, trench raids, foxholes, armored cars, night attacks, flares, sharpshooters in trees, interlaced vines and treetops, which were the forerunners of barbed wire, trip wires to thwart a cavalry charge, which presaged the mine trap, and the general use of anesthetics.

Deppy is Despina Messinesi, a long-time member of the Vogue staff who, although born in Boston, was born there of Greek parents.

Samuel Gorton was born at Gorton, England, near the present city of Manchester, about 1592.

Whether the Fathers, who died before Christ was born of the Virgin Mary, were justified and saved only by the blood which he shed, and the death which he suffered after his incarnation??

Whether the only price of our redemption were not the death of Christ on the cross, with the rest of his sufferings and obediences, in the time of his life here, after he was born of the Virgin Mary??

In the judgment of Chief of Staff Scott it was ironic that the draft policy of a Democratic President, aimed at Germany, had to be pushed through the House of Representatives by the ranking minority member of the Military Affairs Committee -- a Republican Jew born in Germany!!

Thus, the Church was born and because of its intrinsic character was soon identified as a conservative institution, determined to resist the forces of change, to identify itself with the political rulers, and to maintain a kind of splendid isolation from the masses.

And she replied, `` I was born in America, but I was conceived in Vienna ''.

I was born angry.

He kept his attacks on Republicanism for partisan campaigns, but that is part of the game he was born to play.