Nationality United Kingdom Parents Philip Dunn | Role Playwright Name Nell Dunn | |
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Occupation Playwright, novelist, screenwriter Movies Up the Junction, Poor Cow, Steaming Books Up the Junction, Poor Cow, Cancer Tales, Home Death, My Silver Shoes Similar People Jeremy Sandford, Peter Collinson, Ken Loach, Joseph Losey, Anthony Havelock‑Allan | ||
Writer Nell Dunn on her 50-year writing career
Nell Mary Dunn (born 9 June 1936) is an English playwright, screenwriter and author.
Contents
- Writer Nell Dunn on her 50 year writing career
- Sarah Lloyd Rush Steaming by Nell Dunn
- Early years
- Career
- Personal life
- Works
- Plays
- Film script
- References
Sarah Lloyd Rush - Steaming by Nell Dunn
Early years
The daughter of Sir Philip Dunn and the maternal granddaughter of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn – the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, Dunn was a descendant of Charles II and Nell Gwyn. She was born in London and educated at a convent, which she left at the age of fourteen. "Nell's father didn't believe that his daughters needed any qualifications, and as a result Nell has never passed an exam in her life. She only learnt to read at nine years old and "whenever my father saw my appalling spelling, he would laugh. But it wasn't an unkind laugh. In his laugh there was the message, 'You are a completely original person, and everything you do has your own mark on it.' He wanted us all to be unique," she says. Although she came from an upper-class background, in 1959 Dunn moved to Battersea and made friends in the neighbourhood and worked for a time in a sweet factory. This world inspired much of what Dunn would later write. Dunn was married to writer Jeremy Sandford from 1957 to 1979; the couple had three sons. She attended the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Career
Dunn came to notice with the publication of Up the Junction (1963), a series of short stories set in South London, some of which had already appeared in the New Statesman. The book, awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, was a controversial success at the time because of its vibrant, realistic and nonjudgmental portrait of the working class protagonists. It was adapted for television by Dunn (and Ken Loach) for The Wednesday Play series which was directed by Ken Loach and broadcast in November 1965. A cinema film version was released in 1968.
A collection of interviews, Talking to Women (1965), preceded the publication of her first novel Poor Cow in 1967. This was a bestseller and also achieved a succès de scandale. Poor Cow was made into a film starring Carol White and Terence Stamp, under Loach's direction.
Her later adult books are Grandmothers (1991) and My Silver Shoes (1996). Dunn's play Steaming was produced in 1981 and a television film Every Breath You Take, was transmitted in 1987. She has also written Sisters, a film script commissioned by the BBC.
She won the 1982 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
Personal life
Dunn became a Patron of Dignity in Dying after her partner, Dan Oestreicher, died of lung cancer.