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"When I grew up, on an
estate, we didn't live in a classic extended family, but there
were all my aunties, cousins, my mum and granny. It was after
the war and all the men were on shift in the factories, so I
was brought up in a very maternalistic atmosphere, and I suppose
I must have spent a lot of time sitting un-noticed but absorbing
the women's view of the world. You know what adults are like
when they're all together, talking; they think a small child
isn't interested or isn't taking it in. But I think I did - not
by consciously doing so. I think I absorbed it through my pores"
At his Mum's suggestion he
became a women's hairdresser when he left school at 15 and although
maintains he was never very good at it, Willy eventually managed
a shop in Kirkby. He was a hairdresser for six years, an experience,
he says, that made him an indifferent dresser of hair but 'a
good listener'. When he left he did a variety of jobs, including
stacking stockings in the warehouse at 'Bear Brand' and a brief
spell in the Ford car factory at Hailwood cleaning girders.
He originally began writing
as a songwriter, composing songs in the folk idiom. Many of his
songs were performed at local folk clubs playing in a semi-pro
capacity on the same kind of circuit where the likes of Billy
Connolly, Barbara Dickson, Mike Harding, Jasper Carrot and Victoria
Wood cut their teeth. He contributed songs and sketches to local
radio programmes. Willy also ran a folk club for a time. He had
one song recorded on a Radio Enterprise LP 'A Sampler of Britain'
and he and his group The Kirkby Town 3 performed on Granada TV
in 1967 - losing out in a talent competition that also featured
an early incarnation of Tyrannosaurus Rex and was ultimately
won by the band Amen Corner.
He also collaborated on a stage
documentary ' A Lancashire Story' (performed at Notre Dame College,
Liverpool in 1969). At the age of twenty, he decided to complete
his education and went to college in order to improve his qualifications,
after which he became a schoolteacher in Toxteth. Willy met Annie
(now his wife) and at her prompting, he became more interested
in drama, started going to plays and began to write.
His ambition to be a serious
writer was fired and further focused when he saw a production
of John McGrath's Unruly Elements at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre
in 1971. What he particularly noticed about this play was 'the
poetry of common speech', and this has been a hallmark of his
own work.
His first play, Keep
Your Eyes Down, was produced in 1971, but he made his
name with John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert,
a musical about the Beatles. This had been commissioned by the
Liverpool Everyman where it ran for a (then) unprecedented eight
weeks before transferring to the West End where it won the Evening
Standard and London Theatre Critics awards for the best musical
of 1974. Thereafter his plays have won widespread popular and
critical acclaim. He has said that his work is concerned with
the essential goodness of humanity, and although his characters
are often depicted in bleak circumstances, there is an underlying
optimism and warmth in his view of the world. This has inevitably
led to accusations of sentimentality, but on the whole Willy
Russell manages to avoid this pitfall.
Two of his best-known plays
have female protagonists, Educating Rita, which
was inspired by his own experience of returning to education,
is about a young woman working class woman who decides to study
English with the Open University. Much of the comedy arises from
her fresh, unschooled reaction to the classics of English literature,
but she is never patronised by the author, who recognises from
his own experience that education is a means of escape from one's
own circumstances. Shirley Valentine is also about
escape, and takes the form of a monologue by a housewife before
and after a transforming holiday in Greece. Both plays were made
into very successful films from Willy Russell's own screenplays,
featuring the actresses who originally created the roles on stage
(Julie Walters, and Pauline Collins each of whom won an Oscar
nomination for their respective roles, as did Russell for his
Educating Rita screenplay).
Willy Russell's other huge
theatrical success has been Blood Brothers, 'a
Liverpudlian folk opera' about a pair of twins separated at birth
and brought up in completely different environments. It continues
to enjoy a very long run in London's West End and played a two
year run on Broadway. The British touring version continues to
play to packed houses and amongst the many new foreign productions
currently being planned, a second Korean production opens this
year, directed by Glen Walford.
Willy Russell has also written
plays for television, the most famous of which was Our
Day Out, an affecting story of a group of Liverpool schoolchildren
on a coach outing with two teachers, one of whom is a disciplinarian,
the other a liberal. This play has been enacted by tens of thousands
of school kids across the UK.
The Wrong Boy, Willy Russell's first novel, was
published in 2000 to critical acclaim and, as with his all his
plays, has been translated into many different languages.
In 2003 Willy Russell's first
album - Hoovering The Moon - was released, and
Willy's musical talent, partially sheltered for years behind
his literary skills, was available for all to see and hear. In
2004 Hoovering the Moon was given a full commercial
release and is now available at gigs, direct from this web-site,
and also from record shops across the UK. A successful tour followed
its release with In Other Words & Singing
Playwrights touring with fellow wordsmith Tim Firth and
a full band.
Willy Russell continues to
live and work in his home city of Liverpool and in 2006 is currently
working on a number of projects.
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