George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).
- Profession: Playwright.
- Residences: Dublin, Ayot St Lawrence, London.
- Relation to Mahler:
- Correspondence with Mahler:
- Born: 26-07-1856 Dublin, Ireland.
- Died: 02-11-1950 Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.
- Buried: 00-00-0000 Shaw was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, London. His ashes were mixed together with those of his wife, Charlotte Payne-Townshend who had died in 1943, and scattered in the garden of his home, Shaw’s Corner. He had lived there from 1906 until his death. The house, which now in the care of the National Trust (NT), was opened to the public on the March 17, 1951 by the actress Dame Edith Evans.
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. He was also an essayist, novelist and short story writer. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems with a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Issues which engaged Shaw’s attention included education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.
He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the St Pancras Vestry.
Shaw was noted for expressing his views in uncompromising language, whether on vegetarianism (branding his own pre-vegetarian self a “cannibal”), the development of the human race (his own brand of eugenics was driven by encouragement of miscegenation and marrying across class lines), or on political questions (in spite of his own generally liberal views he was not an uncritical supporter of democracy, and is even recorded as supporting, or at least condoning, the dictators of the 1930s).
In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They settled in Ayot St Lawrence in a house now called Shaw’s Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling from a ladder. He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Academy Award (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (an adaptation of his play of the same name), respectively. Shaw refused all other awards and honours, including the offer of a knighthood.
