Rodney Ackland was an actor, screenwriter, and playwright whose work peaked in the 1930s to 1950s. Born in 1908 in Southend, Essex, he was the son of a mantle manufacturer and jewelry dealer who emigrated from Warsaw and married a musical star.<\/p>\n
Ackland is best known as an actor for his work with Alfred Hitchcock (The Skin Game<\/em>, 1931;\u00a0Number Seventeen,<\/em> 1932) and as an adaptor (Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment<\/i>, 1945). In 1942, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay of 49th Parallel, <\/em>which was released in the United States as The Invaders<\/em>.<\/p>\n In the theatre, notable productions include the two musicals Blossom Time<\/em> (1942) at the Lyric Theatre and The Belle of New York <\/em>(1943) at the Whitehall Theatre. The expensive production of The Pink Room<\/i> or The Escapists<\/i>, which premiered in 1952, stifled Ackland’s theatre career. The play, set in a seedy Soho club, was rewritten and retitled by Ackland (Absolute Hell<\/em>) and revived in 1988 in a successful production at the Orange Tree Theatre. It was subsequently adapted and directed for BBC Television by Anthony Page in 1991 (starring Dame Judi Dench) in a production that was also seen on stage four years later at the Royal National Theatre (1995). Plays<\/p>\n —.\u00a0Absolute Hell<\/i>. London: Oberon Books, 1996.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n —. Plays One: The Dark River; After\u00a0October<\/i>. London: Oberon Books, 1997.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n —. Plays Two: Smithereens; Strange Orchestra; Before the Party; The Old Ladies<\/i>. London: Oberon, 2001.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rodney Ackland was an actor, screenwriter, and playwright whose work peaked in the 1930s to 1950s. Born in 1908 in Southend, Essex, he was the son of a mantle manufacturer and jewelry dealer who emigrated from Warsaw and married a musical star. Ackland is best known as an actor for his work with Alfred Hitchcock […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":561,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1157","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/britishjewishtheatre.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/britishjewishtheatre.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/britishjewishtheatre.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/britishjewishtheatre.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/britishjewishtheatre.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/britishjewishtheatre.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2548,"href":"https:\/\/britishjewishtheatre.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1157\/revisions\/2548"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/britishjewishtheatre.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/britishjewishtheatre.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAckland died in 1991.<\/p>\n