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Beginning as a writer of light comedies, Rattigan became more determined to write more serious dramas after the Second World War; the most famous of which are The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), and Separate Tables (1954).

Many of his works have been filmed and are frequently revived. Rattigan disliked the Swinging London of the 1960s and moved to Bermuda, where he lived off the proceeds from lucrative screenplays including The V.I.P.s and The Yellow Rolls-Royce.

For a time, Rattigan was the highest-paid screenwriter in the world. He was knighted in the early seventies and moved back to Britain, where he experienced a minor revival in his reputation before his death. He died in 1977 at the age of 66.

Fifteen years after his death, largely through a revival of The Deep Blue Sea, at the Almeida Theatre, directed by the filmmaker Karel Reisz, Rattigan has increasingly been seen as one of the century’s finest playwrights, an expert choreographer of emotion, and an anatomist of human emotional pain.