The controversial Australian playwright had passed away aged 87.

Playwright and screenwriter Alan Seymour has passed away aged 87.

Born in Fremantle in Western Australia in 1927, Seymour began his career somewhat inauspiciously after leaving school at 15. After working within local radio as an announcer on the commercial station 6PM, and then briefly as an advertising copywriter and film critic, he began writing drama for the ABC in Sydney.

Seymour first came to national prominence in 1958, after penning the controversial, divisive, but hugely thought provoking play The One Day of the Year. Inspired by seeing drunken veterans brawling outside pubs on ANZAC Day, and by an article in the Sydney Newspaper Noi Soit lambasting the annual commemoration, Seymour’s play caused outraged when it was first performed in Adelaide in 1960. In stark contrast to the accepted sacrosanct attitude toward the annual ANZAC memorial day, The One Day of the Year was a critique of the blindly nationalistic and imperial mindset behind the war commemoration, suggesting a growing social divide existed within Australia as more people began questioning old values.

It was a radical narrative and Seymour received death threats, and a bomb scare delayed the opening of the first professional production of the play at the Palace Theatre in Sydney, in 1961. However in the ensuing fifty years this daring work of theatre has become a standard text studied in the Australian school curriculum, as well as being staged across the world. Most recently the play was revived in 2003 by the Sydney Theatre Company, in the presence of the playwright, and is due to be performed in London later in 2015.

Following this explosive debut work, which had unendeared the writer to the ABC, Seymour’s talents were recognised overseas and he was engaged to work as a staff script writer for the BBC in London. Among his credits while in the UK were episodes of Frost in May, House of Eliott, and the hugely popular adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ children’s classic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Seymour went on to also live in Turkey before returning to Australia in 1995.

Seymour was accompanied on his international travels by his partner, Ron Baddeley. The pair met in the 1950s and lived together for over 54 years until Baddeley’s death in 2003 at the age of 80. Seymour spent the last years of his life in an care home in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay after her developed the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

Seymour was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in recognition of his services to the arts, in 2007.