Emlyn Williams: Growing into Marriage

Abstract

In 1937, George Emlyn Williams wrote and starred in a play entitled He Was Born Gay, codirected by and costarring him and John Gielgud, whose homosexuality was made public after a 1953 arrest in a Chelsea men’s room.¹ Needless to say, Williams meant something quite different by “gay,” but for our purposes, the title of this rather flimsy historical romance about the son of Marie Antoinette hiding out in a Dover inn is a fitting epigraph for a study of Emlyn Williams, whose life is a fascinating chapter in the history of gay narratives of marriage. When twenty-two-year-old Emlyn Williams made his professional stage debut in London in 1927, the year his memoir Emlyn begins, Somerset Maugham was the most successful writer in England, Noël Coward’s star was in its ascendance, and Terence Rattigan was a schoolboy who would in nine years have his first play on in the West End. Coward would become a close friend. Williams met the “strikingly handsome” Rattigan at a soiree at John Gielgud’s flat in 1934 and had great success playing barrister Sir Roland Morton in the original production of Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy a dozen years later. Though he wrote twenty plays and starred in many plays and films, Williams never quite had the same place in British theater history as these artists. Like them, he wrote commercial fare, but with less consistent success.

Doctor Jekyll is anxious to marry you if you’ll have him, but Mr. Hyde insists on being at the wedding.

Emlyn Williams, Accolade