JOHN Osborne, unapologetic rebel and original Angry Young Man, changed the face of modern British theatre with Look Back In Anger in 1956. An actor turned playwright, he had about him the public showmanship of his own tragic invention, Archie Rice in The Entertainer.

But he also suffered from immobilising depressions, which he hid from the outside world, and ended his life in desperate poverty.

Now Manchester-born theatre critic John Heilpern has been given access to Osborne's unseen personal notebooks and other private letters for John Osborne - A Patriot For Us, his authorised, but fearless, biography of a man whose private life was so tumultuous that, although claiming to hate both actresses and critics, he married three actresses and two critics!

"The private notebooks were sensational and the key for me to discovering what accounted for the darkness of his soul," Heilpern, now the theatre critic for The New York Observer, told me.

"I used to work with Helen, his last wife, when she was Arts Editor of The Observer newspaper, where I worked for a number of years. Seven years ago, she took me completely by surprise by showing up to see me in New York and asking me to write a biography of her late husband, who I couldn't possibly claim to have known very well.

"I was so staggered to be asked that my first instinct was to take to the hills but I said I would think about it. I thought I might be able to get out of it by asking her 'what does no one know about your husband?'

Class

"Her response was his private notebooks. No outsider had read them before, although there were a few brief, random extracts from them in his 1981 autobiography A Better Class Of Person.

"I was hooked at that point although Helen warned me he most frequently wrote them during sleepless nights when severely depressed, he didn't record anything in them when he was content or happy.

"I realised that they weren't the full story, but they were a window on his soul." Heilpern does, by what he candidly admits was "a great deal of luck", finally come upon "the Rosebud moment" that explained Osborne's torment and fury.

"It took me seven years to write this book, with a break of a year or two for unavoidable naps, and I came upon this piece of information right at the last moment," he admits.

Heilpern was born in Prestwich "and was in the same class at Stand Grammar School as Howard Jacobson, who still hasn't got over the day they made me editor of the school magazine," he chuckles. "But he was better at ping pong than me. He wasn't always but he improved with a lot of hard work."

Discussions

Another of John's acquaintances, with whom he used to "have deep philosophical discussions in Lapidus's chip shop" was Mike Leigh.

"I don't think Lap's in Prestwich Village exists anymore, which is a pity. They ought to put a plaque on the building!" (Do you remember Lap's the chip shop? Write to our Memories page if you have any fond recollections.)

John also fondly recalls buying "mouth-watering" bagels at Bookbinder's, where Elkie Brooks (née Bookbinder) lived, although his oldest friend from Manchester days was, and remains, Bruce Myers, who became one of Peter Brook's star actors, and recently starred at The Lowry in Brook's The Grand Inquisitor.

After school John went to Hertford College, Oxford, and read Law "which heightened my enthusiasm for practically anything else! I therefore became a journalist."

His subsequent theatre profiles and reviews for The Observer have been collected in a book, winningly called How Good Is David Mamet, Anyway?, while another book, Conference Of the Birds, chronicles "a half-mad trip Peter Brook and a whole mad gang of us made through the Sahara Desert and Africa."

One of his most memorable interviewees was, he recalls, a 90-year-old LS Lowry "who was frightfully depressed and seemed most keen to know why his hair was standing on end. I had no idea, of course, but didn't want to depress him even further and so told him it was usually a sign of someone being cheerful, which he appeared to accept. He told me that the one wish he had was to be granted the Freedom of Manchester, which he never got."

In the wake of A Patriot For Us, Heilpern has no plans to write much of anything for quite a while.

"After living for all this time with John Osborne, his depressions, his nervous breakdowns, his five wives and three mistresses, I'm just trying to enjoy my own life for a while," he concludes.

John Osborne - A Patriot For Us is published by Chatto & Windus. Tweet