Biography

Alfred Fagon (25 June 1937 – 29 August 1986) was a British playwright, poet and actor. He was one of the most notable Black British playwrights of the 1970s and 1980s. Fagon worked for British Rail and served in the British Army before he wrote and produced plays at theatres across the UK, including Royal Court Theatre and Hampstead Theatre. Alfred Fagon was born in Clarendon, Jamaica, into a family of nine brothers and two sisters. In 1955 he migrated to England, and worked for British Rail in Nottingham, before in 1958 joining the Royal Corps of Signals, where he became Middleweight Boxing Champion in 1962, leaving the army the following year. He subsequently lived in Bristol, where he began working as an actor, his first stage appearance being at the Bristol Arts Centre, in the Henry Livings play The Little Mrs Foster Show, and in 1970 he starred in Mustapha Matura's play Black Pieces at the ICA in London. Fagon went on to write and produce plays, including 11 Josephine House, Death of a Blackman and Four Hundred Pounds,and took on many more acting roles, in television, film and radio, as well as in theatre.Fagon died of a heart attack outside his flat in Camberwell on 29 August 1986, aged 49. Police claimed they were unable to identify him and he was given a pauper's funeral.