Tennessee Williams on the BBC

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2020

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The great American playwright gave several interviews to the BBC over the years and some of them provide revealing insights into his personal life. He spoke about loneliness, mental illness and even touched on his own homosexuality at a time when very few people were open about those things in public. Vincent Dowd has been delving through the BBC archive.

Photo: Tennessee Williams in London in 1965. Credit: Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds.
0:29.2	You're listening to Witness History on the BBC World Service, I'm Vincent Dowd.
0:39.3	In 1947, the play A streetcar named Desire
0:43.2	made Tennessee Williams the hottest name in American theatre
0:47.6	and the later films of Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin roof
0:51.4	made him world famous.
0:53.4	But William's personal life was seldom easy,
0:56.8	as he discusses in revealing interviews
0:59.8	in the BBC Archives.
1:09.6	A streetcar named Desire electrified post-war America.
1:14.2	On Broadway, Tennessee Williams placed sensuality, centre-stage as no American playwright ever
1:21.0	had.
1:22.0	It became a hit film with Vivian Lee as Blanch de Bois and Marlon Brando as the brother-in-law she can't resist.
1:30.0	All right now, Mr. Kowalski, let us proceed without any more digression in the state of Louisiana we got here
1:35.4	What's known as the Napoleonic code according to what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband also and vice versa
	...

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