Charles Osborne (1) (1927–2017)

Charles Osborne was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1927. He worked in literary and musical journalism and in the theatre as an actor and director in Australia and Great Britain until, in 1958, he became Assistant Editor of The London Magazine and also began broadcasting for the BBC. From 1971 to 1986, he was a director of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and from 1986 to 1991, Chief Drama Critic of the London Daily Telegraph, for which newspaper he remains a regular book reviewer. Since 1970, he has been a member of the editorial board of Opera magazine.

Osborne, an international authority on opera--and a Verdi specialist, has written several books on that composer as well as guides to the operas of Mozart, Puccini, Straus, and Wagner. Three volumes of his poems have been published, and his autobiography, Giving it Away, appeared in 1986. In 1993 he was presented with the Amici di Verdi Gold Medal to honour his published work on Verdi over the past thirty years, and in 1994 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Griffith University, Australia, in recognition of his long and distinguished service to the arts. [from The Unexpected Guest (1999)]