Please put your hands together for . . . Willy Russell.

Willy Russell was born in Whiston near Liverpool, in 1947 he grew up in a left-wing household and he left Secondary School with an O-Level in English.
He also collaborated on a stage documentary ' A Lancashire Story' (performed at Notre Dame College, Liverpool in 1969). At the age of twenty, he decided to complete his education and went to college in order to improve his qualifications, after which he became a schoolteacher in Toxteth. Willy met Annie (now his wife) and at her prompting, he became more interested in drama, started going to plays and began to write.
His ambition to be a serious writer was fired and further focused when he saw a production of John McGrath's Unruly Elements at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre in 1971. What he particularly noticed about this play was 'the poetry of common speech', and this has been a hallmark of his own work.
His first play, Keep Your Eyes Down, was produced in 1971, but he made his name with John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert, a musical about the Beatles. This had been commissioned by the Liverpool Everyman where it ran for a (then) unprecedented eight weeks before transferring to the West End where it won the Evening Standard and London Theatre Critics awards for the best musical of 1974. Thereafter his plays have won widespread popular and critical acclaim. He has said that his work is concerned with the essential goodness of humanity, and although his characters are often depicted in bleak circumstances, there is an underlying optimism and warmth in his view of the world. This has inevitably led to accusations of sentimentality, but on the whole Willy Russell manages to avoid this pitfall.
Two of his best-known plays have female protagonists, Educating Rita, which was inspired by his own experience of returning to education, is about a young woman working class woman who decides to study English with the Open University. Much of the comedy arises from her fresh, unschooled reaction to the classics of English literature, but she is never patronised by the author, who recognises from his own experience that education is a means of escape from one's own circumstances. Shirley Valentine is also about escape, and takes the form of a monologue by a housewife before and after a transforming holiday in Greece. Both plays were made into very successful films from Willy Russell's own screenplays, featuring the actresses who originally created the roles on stage (Julie Walters, and Pauline Collins each of whom won an Oscar nomination for their respective roles, as did Russell for his Educating Rita screenplay).
Willy Russell's other huge theatrical