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Emlyn Williams

44 of 283 portraits by Angus McBean

Angus McBean Photograph. © Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University.

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Emlyn Williams

by Angus McBean
bromide print, 1948
11 1/2 in. x 9 1/2 in. (291 mm x 241 mm)
Purchased, 2001
Primary Collection
NPG P927

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  • Angus McBean (1904-1990), Photographer. Artist or producer associated with 283 portraits, Sitter in 79 portraits.

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  • Pepper, Terence, Angus McBean Portraits, 2006 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 5 July to 22 October 2006), p. 65 Read entry

    A further subject for the 'Play Personalities' series was the playwright Emlyn Williams. He is posed against a photographic enlargement of a page from his script Trespass, which premiered at the Globe Theatre in July 1947 and in which he played the role of Saviello. Next to him is a pile of his other scripts, on top of which is Spring 1600, a play about Richard Burbage, Shakespeare's leading man. McBean first photographed his fellow countryman, who was born in North Wales, when Williams appeared in the role of Morgan Evans in his own play The Corn is Green (1938). Williams had first come to prominence with the 400 performances enjoyed by his play Night Must Fall (1935). By the 1950s, when Samuel Beckett and John Osborne had made Williams's finely crafted middlebrow dramas and thrillers theatrically unfashionable, he had turned to film roles and a series of bravura readings as various literary personalities, most notably Charles Dickens (from 1951), Dylan Thomas (from 1955) and Saki (H. H. Munro; 1977).

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Current affairs

Prince Charles is born in Buckingham Palace; he is the first son of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh
The Secretary of State for Health, Aneurin Bevan, introduces the National Health Service. Health services in Britain were now funded from central taxation and free at the point of use for every resident of the country.

Art and science

The First Morris Minor car designed by Alec Issigonis and his team (also responsible for the Mini) takes to the road, becoming a popular and classic English design.
F.R. Leavis publishes his influential study of the English novel, The Great Tradition. The book set out Leavis's ideas on the proper relationship between literary form and moral concern.

International

The policy of Apartheid is adopted in South Africa. Apartheid was a set of laws allowing racial segregation and discrimination against the black majority by the white ruling class.
As part of the dispute between Western and Soviet controlled Berlin, the Soviet Union blockades West Berlin, cutting off supplies. Anxious to avoid a conflict, America, Britain and France responded by flying in food and other provisions.

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