Willy Russell

Willy Russell, born William Russell on 23 August 1947 in Whiston, Lancashire, is an English dramatist, lyricist, and composer whose works for stage, screen, and television have been produced across the globe. He left school at fifteen and spent several years working as a women's hairdresser, eventually operating his own salon, before returning to college at twenty. That decision led him to qualify as a teacher at Saint Katherine's College of Higher Education in Liverpool, and during those years he also performed as a semi-professional singer-songwriter in folk clubs.

Russell's earliest dramatic writing emerged while he was still in teacher training. His first play, Keep Your Eyes Down, was written in 1971 and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that same year. In 1972 he brought a programme of three one-act plays to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where writer John McGrath saw the work and recommended Russell to the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. The Everyman commissioned an adaptation that became Russell's first professional theatrical work.

His breakthrough as a musical theatre writer came in 1974 with John, Paul, George, Ringo ... and Bert, a musical about the Beatles commissioned by the Liverpool Everyman. After an unprecedented eight-week run at the Everyman Theatre, it transferred to the Lyric Theatre in the West End, where it ran for over a year and won both the Evening Standard and London Theatre Critics awards for best musical of 1974. Stage works including One for the Road (1976) and Stags and Hens (1978) followed, alongside television writing that included the BBC film Death of a Young Young Man (1975), Our Day Out (1977), Daughters of Albion (1979), and the five-part serial One Summer (1983).

Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Educating Rita premiered at the Warehouse, London in 1980, with Julie Walters and Mark Kingston in the leading roles, before transferring to the Piccadilly Theatre in the West End in August of that year. The production ran at least through June 1982 and earned Russell the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 1980. The 1983 film adaptation, starring Michael Caine and Julie Walters, brought Russell an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as nominations from BAFTA and the Golden Globes.

Blood Brothers, Russell's musical about twin brothers separated at birth and raised in contrasting circumstances, premiered in 1983 and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical. A 1988 West End revival accumulated over 10,000 consecutive performances across a twenty-four-year run that concluded in November 2012. The production simultaneously sustained UK touring and international engagements, including a two-year Broadway run beginning in 1993. That Broadway production earned Russell a Tony Award nomination for Best Book of a Musical, one of his two Tony nominations.

Shirley Valentine, written for the Liverpool Everyman in 1986, moved to a celebrated West End run that brought Russell the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 1988 and earned star Pauline Collins the Olivier for Actress of the Year in a New Play. The play transferred to Broadway in February 1989, running through November of that year, and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Play, with Collins winning the Tony for Best Actress. The 1989 film version, again featuring Collins, resulted in an Oscar nomination for her performance and a BAFTA nomination for Russell's screenplay. Russell also received the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Screenplay for the Shirley Valentine film in 1990.

In 1985, Russell co-wrote the song The Show with Ron Hutchinson as the theme for the television series Connie. Performed by Rebecca Storm and released by Towerbell Records in June 1985, the single reached number twenty-two on the UK Singles Chart. Working with musical collaborator Bob Eaton, Russell later expanded Our Day Out into a full stage musical, which was produced at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool in 2010 with a new score and updated setting.

Russell published his first novel, The Wrong Boy, in 2000, and in 2004 returned to his singer-songwriter background by releasing the album Hoovering the Moon on Pure Records. He also co-produced the Tim Firth album Harmless Flirting. In 2013, Liverpool John Moores University established the Willy Russell Archive within its Archive and Special Collections department, housing manuscripts, correspondence, production records, audio and film material, and promotional ephemera spanning the full course of his career.

Russell married Annie Seagroatt in 1969. The couple have one son, Rob, and two daughters, Rachel and Ruth.