A Taste of Honey Playwright Shelagh Delaney Dies at Age 71

British playwright and screenwriter Shelagh Delaney, best known for her highly influential 1958 debut play A Taste of Honey, died at her daughter’s home in eastern England on November 20. She was 71 years old. The cause was cancer.

Delaney was just 19 years old when A Taste of Honey was first performed on May 27, 1958 at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London. It went on to transfer to the West End in 1959 and to Broadway in 1960, where it starred Angela Lansbury and Joan Plowright, who won a Tony Award for her performance.

Born the daughter of a bus inspector in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire, Delaney initially intended A Taste of Honey to be a novel but turned it into a play after seeing—and disliking—Terence Rattigan's Variations On a Theme on tour. The play, scandalous for its day, is about a young woman who gets pregnant after a one-night stand with a black sailor, and her supportive relationship with a gay artist. Delaney's second play, The Lion in Love, was produced in 1960 at the Belgrade theatre in Coventry, and transferred to the Royal Court in London later that year.

Delaney went on to co-write the 1961 film adaptation of A Taste of Honey with director Tony Richardson, and won the BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award in 1962. Her other screenplays include The White Bus, Charlie Bubbles and Dance with a Stranger. She also wrote a memoir, Sweetly Sings the Donkey, and is credited as an inspiration for The Smiths frontman Morrissey, who used Delaney's words in his songs and her face on the cover of the band's 1987 album, Louder than Bombs.

Delaney is survived by her daughter, Charlotte, and her grandchildren, Max, Gable and Rosa.