Alan Seymour

Alan Seymour (6 June 192723 March 2015) was an Australian playwright and author. He is best known for the play The One Day of the Year. His international reputation rests not only on this early play, but also on his many screenplays, television scripts and adaptations of novels for film and television. After that he was brought up by his sister May and her husband, Alfred Chester Cruthers. He was educated at Perth Modern School, leaving at 15 after failing to complete the Junior Certificate. He found work as a radio announcer in a commercial radio station 6PM. During his two years there he wrote a number of short radio plays that were broadcast live. In 1945 he moved to Sydney, New South Wales, where he worked as an advertising copy-writer with raio station 2UE.

He returned to Perth after the war where he worked as a free-lance writer for ABC Radio. Seymour became ABC Radio's film critic. He joined a commercial radio station 6KY as an announcer and copy-writer and after six months was offered an announcing post at the ABC. In 1949, he met Ron Baddeley, an RAAF veteran, and the two would become life partners.

From 1966 to 1971 he lived in İzmir, Turkey, where Ron Baddeley had gained employment as an English teacher. There Seymour wrote a novelisation of The One Day of the Year, and another novel The Coming Self-Destruction of the United States of America, as well as stage plays and magazine articles. From 1974 to 1981, he was a script editor and occasional producer with BBC Television, after which he returned to freelance writing. In 2003, after a partnership of almost 55 years, Ron Baddeley died at age 80. and died in an aged care facility in Elizabeth Bay in 2015, aged 87. In April 1961, at the first professional season at the Palace Theatre in Sydney, a bomb scare during a dress rehearsal forced police to clear the theatre. Later that year the production was staged at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, in London. Since then it has been staged regularly throughout Australia and internationally and a television adaptations were produced in Australia and Britain in 1962. It is also studied in various school curricula.

Select writings Tomorrow's Child (1957) – TV play The Lark (1959) – TV play One Bright Day (1959) – TV play The Life and Death of King Richard II (1960) – TV play Lean Liberty (1961) Donny Johnson (1961) The Runner (1962) – TV play Auto Stop (1965) - TV play The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne (1965) - TV play Winter Passion (1962) - radio play The Christopher Marlowe Murder Mystery And It Wasn't Just the Feathers Stockbrokers Are Smashing: But Bankers Are Better Break in the Music (1966) - stage play The Glass Virgin (1995) – television screenplay