Willy Russell's plays tell stories of dreams, aspirations, escape, and the pursuit of happiness. His characters strive to flee from a deadly, stifling environment and achieve something finer-or, at least, they dream of doing so. Such a sentiment puts Russell firmly in the camp of those writers who celebrate the possibilities of humanity; as he told Tony Dunn in a 1993 interview, "I don't want to use any medium as a platform for displaying the smallness and hopelessness of man. Man is man because madly, possibly, stupidly and certainly wonderfully, he kicks against the inevitability of life."

William Martin Russell was born in Whiston, Lancashire, near Liverpool, on 23 August 1947. He attended schools in Knowsley and Rainford, Lancashire, but left in 1963 without taking his university qualifying examinations. From 1963 to 1968 he worked as a hairdresser in Liverpool and Kirkby; in 1968-1969 he worked as a laborer in a warehouse. Between 1965 and...