Willy Russell, the author of the musical Blood Brothers, which has been running in the West End for more than 20 years, is trying his hand at another career, singing. When he left school at 15 he became a women’s hairdresser and five years later returned to college. He used his experience of late education to write Educating Rita, which became an Oscar-winining film and he later wrote Shirley Valentine, which also has a heroine eager to escape her present life. Russell has been writing songs since the early 1960s but has only recently started performing. His show The Singing Playwrights is on the Edinburgh Fringe this week and is described as “a concert mixed with poetry reading, sprinkled with stand-up, in a bowl of linguistic pyrex”. He will spend his birthday singing. Willy Russell is 57 today.
RGT
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