Word: tynan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After two years, Tynan quit the Standard in a huff because the paper refused to stop printing letters criticizing his own acting. (Fleet Streeters also half-jokingly said that he infuriated his boss Lord Beaverbrook at a dinner party by blowing a smoke ring across the table into the Beaver's open mouth.) On Lord Rothermere's Sketch he found the tabloid an incongruous place for his erudite, allusive prose. But his new job on the more highbrow Observer is just the kind of spot that Tynan has wanted ever since Oxford. On the Observer, says...
...pretend to know about 60% of what there is to know, which is roughly true." He worked on his books, produced and directed 28 plays in a repertory group and took to the stage himself. An Evening Standard critic saw him in a production of Hamlet, wrote: "Mr. Kenneth Tynan, who did the First Player last night, would not get a chance in a village hall unless he were related to the vicar. His performance was quite dreadful." Tynan, outraged at the review, wrote such a lively letter to the Standard ("My performance in Hamlet was not 'quite dreadful...
...Critic Tynan has made sure that no one could ever say that about him. Pale and lanky ("He has the sort of face you would expect to see reflected in a spoon," says one acquaintance), he often dresses in flowered waistcoats and velvet-lapeled jackets with turned-back Edwardian cuffs, and a mink necktie. "It looks like a raccoon at my jugular," says Tynan. "People ask me, 'Who's your friend?' " At home, with his two-year-old daughter and his American-born wife Elaine Dundy, he sometimes wears leopard-skin pants...
...Neither Tynan's dress nor his outrageous posturing is any accident. Born in Birmingham, the son of a merchant, he went up to Oxford at 18, well aware that "anyone who wants to play an eccentric to that crowd bloody well had better go about it like a professional." That is just what Kenneth Tynan bloody well...
Dreadful Performance. Tynan's professionalism consisted of purple doeskin suits, gold satin shirts and floppy velvet cravats. At Oxford Union debates, where he starred, he occasionally turned a handstand on the speaker's rostrum. He celebrated his 21st birthday by hiring a barge and floating a party down the Isis. Oxonians were both so outraged and fascinated by his eccentricities that they burned him in effigy-in a plum-colored suit. In mocking outrage, Tynan got a car and drove headlong through the bonfire...