Willy Russell was born to a working-class family in a small town just outside of Liverpool, England in 1947.
Liverpool and its environs--a region of factories and bleak urban landscapes--constitute one of England's largest metropolitan areas. A center of shipping and manufacturing, Liverpool since the end of the Second World War has experienced economic stagnation and social decline. The city became known to the world during the 1960s as the home of The Beatles, whose wisecracking effrontery and ironic, often cynical sense of humor were regarded as typical of the disillusioned--and sometimes despairing--outlook of Liverpool's working classes.
Willy Russell's work as a writer has been profoundly influenced by these regional circumstances and attitudes. Although not an outstanding student, Russell developed an early love of reading, and fantasized about becoming a writer. He describes this longing as, “a wonderful and terrible thought--wonderful because I sensed, I knew, it was the only thing for me. Terrible because how could I, a kid from the 'D' stream, a piece of factory fodder, ever change the course that my life was already set upon? How the hell could I ever be the sort of person who could become a writer? It was a shocking and ludicrous thought, one that I hid deep in myself for years, but one that would not go away.”
From the outset, then, Russell felt that the social world into which he was born was opposed to his deepest desires. Hiding his yearning to write, Russell managed only a mediocre academic career in primary and secondary schools, and after failing the entrance exam for an apprenticeship as a printer, his family decided he should become a ladies' hairdresser, a career he followed from age sixteen to twenty-two. After six years of a job he "didn't understand and didn't like," Russell finally began to write--an activity he squeezed in between hairdressing appointments. Eventually he realized that,
if ever I was to become a writer I had first to get myself into the sort of world which allowed for, possibly even encouraged such aspiration. But that would mean a drastic change of course. Could I do it? Could I do something which those around me didn't understand? I would have to break away.
Which he did by enrolling in a night course in English literature. After this taste of serious learning, Russell decided he must attend college full-time. However, he lacked the money to pay the tuition. The only way to get it was by taking a job at a factory "cleaning oil from the girders high above the machinery. With no safety equipment whatsoever and with oil on every girder the danger was obvious. But the money was big." After saving enough to pay for college, Russell quit the factory, and enrolled in school. As he says of his first day of classes,
The obvious difference between me and the sixteen-year-olds pouring down the drive made me feel exposed and nervous, but as I entered the glass doors of Childwall College I felt as if I'd made it back to he beginning. I could start again. I felt at home.
Russell's life thus anticipates the stories he would tell in his best known plays: Educating Rita (1980), the musical Blood Brothers (1981), and Shirley Valentine (1986). Like the author himself, the major characters in these plays struggle to overcome their entrapment in spiritually stifling working class environments. And also like the author, these characters feel, paradoxically, that by entering a world radically different from the place of their birth they experience a true homecoming.
In Educating Rita and Blood Brothers the path of escape leads--as it did for Russell--through the doors of a university, which open into richer, more challenging, more fulfilling lives. In Shirley Valentine foreign travel rather than college is the liberating experience--but Shirley's encounter with Greece is as much a discovery through learning as any formal course of studies.
In addition to writing for the stage, Russell has also produced screenplays for three of his plays, including Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine. He is also a singer-songwriter, having performed for more than twenty years with a group known as Kirbytown Three. And he composed both the lyrics and music for Blood Brothers.
About his dramas of escape and self-discovery, Russell has said,
Liverpool and its environs--a region of factories and bleak urban landscapes--constitute one of England's largest metropolitan areas. A center of shipping and manufacturing, Liverpool since the end of the Second World War has experienced economic stagnation and social decline. The city became known to the world during the 1960s as the home of The Beatles, whose wisecracking effrontery and ironic, often cynical sense of humor were regarded as typical of the disillusioned--and sometimes despairing--outlook of Liverpool's working classes.
Willy Russell's work as a writer has been profoundly influenced by these regional circumstances and attitudes. Although not an outstanding student, Russell developed an early love of reading, and fantasized about becoming a writer. He describes this longing as, “a wonderful and terrible thought--wonderful because I sensed, I knew, it was the only thing for me. Terrible because how could I, a kid from the 'D' stream, a piece of factory fodder, ever change the course that my life was already set upon? How the hell could I ever be the sort of person who could become a writer? It was a shocking and ludicrous thought, one that I hid deep in myself for years, but one that would not go away.”
From the outset, then, Russell felt that the social world into which he was born was opposed to his deepest desires. Hiding his yearning to write, Russell managed only a mediocre academic career in primary and secondary schools, and after failing the entrance exam for an apprenticeship as a printer, his family decided he should become a ladies' hairdresser, a career he followed from age sixteen to twenty-two. After six years of a job he "didn't understand and didn't like," Russell finally began to write--an activity he squeezed in between hairdressing appointments. Eventually he realized that,
if ever I was to become a writer I had first to get myself into the sort of world which allowed for, possibly even encouraged such aspiration. But that would mean a drastic change of course. Could I do it? Could I do something which those around me didn't understand? I would have to break away.
Which he did by enrolling in a night course in English literature. After this taste of serious learning, Russell decided he must attend college full-time. However, he lacked the money to pay the tuition. The only way to get it was by taking a job at a factory "cleaning oil from the girders high above the machinery. With no safety equipment whatsoever and with oil on every girder the danger was obvious. But the money was big." After saving enough to pay for college, Russell quit the factory, and enrolled in school. As he says of his first day of classes,
The obvious difference between me and the sixteen-year-olds pouring down the drive made me feel exposed and nervous, but as I entered the glass doors of Childwall College I felt as if I'd made it back to he beginning. I could start again. I felt at home.
Russell's life thus anticipates the stories he would tell in his best known plays: Educating Rita (1980), the musical Blood Brothers (1981), and Shirley Valentine (1986). Like the author himself, the major characters in these plays struggle to overcome their entrapment in spiritually stifling working class environments. And also like the author, these characters feel, paradoxically, that by entering a world radically different from the place of their birth they experience a true homecoming.
In Educating Rita and Blood Brothers the path of escape leads--as it did for Russell--through the doors of a university, which open into richer, more challenging, more fulfilling lives. In Shirley Valentine foreign travel rather than college is the liberating experience--but Shirley's encounter with Greece is as much a discovery through learning as any formal course of studies.
In addition to writing for the stage, Russell has also produced screenplays for three of his plays, including Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine. He is also a singer-songwriter, having performed for more than twenty years with a group known as Kirbytown Three. And he composed both the lyrics and music for Blood Brothers.
About his dramas of escape and self-discovery, Russell has said,
every play I have ever written has, ultimately, been one which celebrates the goodness of man. . . . [I]t is the goodness that I hope the audience is left with. I really don't want to write plays that are resigned, menopausal, despairing. . . . I don't want to use any medium as a platform for displaying the smallness and hopelessness of man. Man is man because madly, possibly stupidly but certainly wonderfully, he kicks against the inevitability of life.