Playwright Shelagh Delaney, best known for A Taste of Honey, has died.
She died of cancer at her daughter's Suffolk home on Sunday night at the age of 71.
Delaney was 19 when A Taste of Honey, about the friendship between a young pregnant woman and a gay artist, premiered in 1958.
The BBC reports she wrote it in two weeks, reworking material she had written for a novel.
The play, considered one of the era's "kitchen sink" dramas, portrayed working class life in Salford where Delaney grew up.
A success in both London and New York, it was filmed in 1961, starring Rita Tushingham.
It opened at Royal Stratford East in London, before moving to the West End in 1959.
In 1960, it opened on Broadway in New York, with Joan Plowright as Jo and Angela Lansbury as her mother. Plowright won a Tony award for her performance.
The BBC reports Delaney's subsequent work never reached the heights of her debut, but she continued to write.
She also wrote the screenplay for Dance With a Stranger (1985), based on the life of Ruth Ellis, who in 1955 was the last woman in Britain to be hanged.
Directed by Mike Newell, it starred Miranda Richardson as Ellis.
