James Bridie (3 January 1888 in Glasgow – 29 January 1951 in Edinburgh) was the pseudonym of a Scottish playwright, screenwriter and physician whose real name was Osborne Henry Mavor.[1][2][3][4][5] He took his pen-name from his paternal grandfather's first name and his grandmother's maiden name.[5]
He was the son of Henry Alexander Mavor (1858–1915), an electrical engineer and industrialist, and his wife Janet Osborne.[6][7] He went to school at Glasgow Academy and then studied medicine at the University of Glasgow graduating in 1913,[8] later becoming a general practitioner, then consultant physician and professor after serving as a military physician during World War I, seeing service in France and Mesopotamia.[9] He came to prominence with his comic play The Anatomist (1931), about the grave robbers Burke and Hare.[10] This and other comedic plays saw success in London, and he became a full-time writer in 1938. He returned to the army during World War II, again serving as a physician.[1]
In 1923, he married Rona Locke Bremner (1897–1985). Their son was killed in World War II.[1] His other son Ronald (1925–2007) was also both a physician and playwright.[11] Ronald became drama critic of The Scotsman after retiring from medicine, Director of the Scottish Arts Council and Deputy Chairman of the Edinburgh Festival.[5] He was Professor of Drama and Head of the Drama Department at the University of Saskatchewan and was appointed C.B.E.[5]
Bridie died in Edinburgh of a stroke and is buried in Glasgow Western Necropolis.[5] The Bridie Library at the Glasgow University Union is named after him, as is the annual Bridie Dinner that takes place in the Union each December.[12]
Bridie was the founder of the Citizens Theatre[13][14] in Glasgow, in association with joint founders art director Dr Tom Honeyman and cinema magnate George Singleton, who also created the Cosmo, predecessor of today's Glasgow Film Theatre. Many of his plays were staged at the Citizens Theatre between 1943 and 1960. Tony Paterson has argued that Bridie's output set the tone for Scottish Theatre until the early Nineteen-Sixties and gave encouragement to other Scottish dramatists such as Robert Kemp, Alexander Reid and George Munro.[15] Alan Riach described (in 2021) Bridie's plays as both serious and offering 'high spirited fun'; both contemporarily 'commercially successful' and yet 'perennially provocative'; raising open questions that Riach considers as Brechtian. He admires the quality of writing in Bridie's 1939 autobiography One Way of Living, calling it a 'modern classic'.[16]
In 1946, Bridie proposed a Scottish Theatre Festival in Perth, with Scottish theatres coming together to make the town a Scottish Salsburg.[17] He was the first chairman of the Arts Council in Scotland and was also instrumental in the establishment of the Edinburgh Festival.[5] In 1950 he founded the Glasgow College of Dramatic Art, part of the Royal Conservatoire today.
Bridie worked with the director Alfred Hitchcock in the late 1940s. They worked together on:
