‘Newsnight’s kindest critic’: Bonnie Greer was always effortlessly in command

Playwright was an unusual mix of originality and authority and in high demand as a cultural critic

Bonnie Greer, who has died at the age of 77, moved to the UK from New York in 1986. She grew up in Chicago, had six siblings, her father worked in a factory and her mother “kept house”, she said once - in a tone so elegantly ominous, she conjured an image of a woman holding up a full dwelling with seven children in it, with her bare hands. Greer was ambitious and, academically, a high flyer, but abandoned her law degree, facing baked-in sexism from professors. Yet, since she started writing plays aged nine, arguably she was just hastening a creative career that was inevitable.

The Actors Studio was what drew her to the West Village in Manhattan in the late 70s, and she was there at the height of the Aids crisis, a brutal time of mass bereavements and poisonous prejudice. She lost around 35 of her friends, and later told the Sunday Times: “I owe those people my life. If I hadn’t met my gay friends I would be a suburban SUV-driving granny. They taught me the value of insurrection and fun. Nearly 30 years on, I’m still that 25-year-old, on top of some bar, in one of those vintage dresses, dancing with those guys.” But when she arrived, touring, at the Edinburgh Festival, it felt like a release, from the “shadow of death”, and a New York theatre scene bereft of its heart. She stayed in the UK permanently.

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