Willy Russell

• 1. Introduction

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  Willy Russell was born on the 23rd of August 1947 in Whiston, Lancashire, and by the time he was fifteen he had left school to become a women's hairdresser. That is not where most stories about celebrated playwrights begin. Yet before Russell turned twenty he had decided to go back to college, qualify as a teacher, and try his hand at writing drama. The question the rest of this documentary tries to answer is how a boy from a small Lancashire town, armed with scissors and a folk guitar, became the writer behind some of the most-produced theatrical works of the late twentieth century.

• 2. Liverpool and the Fringe

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  Saint Katherine's College of Higher Education in Liverpool is where Russell first put a play on paper. Keep Your Eyes Down, written while he trained as a teacher, appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1971. The following year he brought a programme of three one-act plays back to Edinburgh, and in the audience was writer John McGrath. McGrath recommended Russell to the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, which commissioned an adaptation called When The Reds... That commission became Russell's first professional stage work.

  The Liverpool Everyman also commissioned John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert in 1974, a musical about the Beatles. It ran at the Everyman for eight weeks, a duration described at the time as unprecedented, before transferring to the Lyric Theatre in the West End. There it ran for over a year, winning both the Evening Standard and the London Theatre Critics awards for best musical of 1974.

• 3. Television and the Wider Stage

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  Alongside stage work, Russell was building a parallel career in television through the mid-1970s and into the 1980s. Death of a Young Young Man aired on BBC1 in 1975. Our Day Out, a play about a school trip, reached television in 1977. Daughters of Albion followed in 1979, and One Summer, a five-part serial, appeared in 1983.

  One for the Road came in 1976 and Stags and Hens in 1978, two stage works that sat between his bigger commissions. Stags and Hens would eventually be filmed in 1990 under the title Dancin' Thru the Dark. These works are less discussed than his major hits, but they trace a writer building up range and speed across multiple formats simultaneously.

• 4. Educating Rita

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  The Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned Educating Rita, and it premiered at the Warehouse in London in 1980. Julie Walters and Mark Kingston starred in the original production, which transferred to the Piccadilly Theatre in August 1980. The play ran for at least two years in the West End, with its London run continuing to at least June 1982. Since then it has been translated and produced in almost every part of the globe, earning awards for Russell and for many of the actors who have taken the roles of Rita and Frank.

  The 1983 film adaptation starred Michael Caine and Julie Walters. Both Walters and Caine received Academy Award nominations for their performances, and Russell himself was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. He also received nominations from the Golden Globes and from BAFTA for the same script. The Olivier Award for Best New Comedy had already come in 1980, marking the play's arrival as more than a regional success.

• 5. Shirley Valentine

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  Returning to the Liverpool Everyman in 1986, Russell wrote Shirley Valentine, a one-woman play that would travel further than anything he had written before. Pauline Collins starred in both the West End run and the subsequent Broadway engagement, winning the Olivier Award for Actress of the Year in a New Play while Russell took the Olivier for Comedy of the Year. The Broadway run opened in February 1989 and continued through November 1989, earning Collins a Tony Award for Best Actress.

  The 1989 film adaptation, again with Collins, brought Russell another BAFTA nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay and an Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1990. The Tony Award nomination for Best Play that year added to a growing list of recognitions that had by then attached themselves to Russell's name on two continents.

• 6. Blood Brothers

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  Blood Brothers, which Russell described as a Liverpudlian folk opera, is the story of twin brothers separated at birth and raised in completely different environments. It won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical in 1983. Its 1988 revival became one of the longest-running musicals in West End history, accumulating over 10,000 consecutive performances during a run that lasted twenty-four years before closing in November 2012.

  At the same time the West End production was running, touring productions and international stagings kept the show in circulation around the world. A Broadway production opened in 1993 and ran for two years, earning a Tony Award nomination for Best Musical. The 1993 Tony Award nomination for Best Book of a Musical also went to Russell, the same year the Broadway run began.

• 7. Music, Fiction, and Legacy

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  Music was never separate from Russell's writing life. During his early years he had worked as a semi-professional singer, performing original songs in folk clubs. In 1985, he co-wrote the song The Show with series creator Ron Hutchinson as the theme for the television series Connie. Performed by vocalist Rebecca Storm and released by Towerbell Records in June 1985, it reached number 22 on the UK Singles Chart. In 2004, Russell released his album Hoovering the Moon on Pure Records, returning to the singer-songwriter work he had set aside decades earlier. He also co-produced the Tim Firth album Harmless Flirting.

  Russell's first novel, The Wrong Boy, was published in 2000. Our Day Out returned as a full stage musical in 2010, produced at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool; Russell and musical collaborator Bob Eaton extensively rewrote and recomposed the work, updating its setting to the twenty-first century while keeping the original characters and plot. In 2013, the Archive and Special Collections department of Liverpool John Moores University established the Willy Russell Archive, housing manuscripts, correspondence, casting records, audio and film material, and decades of publicity and press documentation.