And while King Henry may have said “My life, when it is written, will read better than it lived,” the man who invented these words for Henry did not share his zeitgeist. His outlook on life prevented him from worrying enough about such mortal trivia to bother answering his own question. It mattered terribly to Eleanor, but not to James Goldman. “Does it matter what comes after us?” Eleanor asked in the play.

I think his sense of humor was everything about him.” And it has to do with his point of view of the world. “ The Lion in Winter could have been a tragedy as easily as a comedy. “He understood what comedy was about,” said his agent and wife of twenty-seven years, Barbara Goldman, in an interview with the Utah Shakespeare Festival. It has to be imagined.”Īudience members mustn’t be misled into thinking that The Lion in Winter is a drama. In 1980 he wrote, “The truth of things is always underneath. What they were really like, of course, no one will ever know,” wrote James Goldman in his preface to The Lion in Winter. “I read about the things they did, I studied them and then imagined what they felt and thought and said and wanted from their lives.

But his specialty seems to have been English history, with twelfth century ruler Henry II as the central character in The Lion in Winter, and he used thirteenth-century King John as the subject of his novel Myself as Witness and in the film Robin and Marian. Russian history studies led him to write about Tolstoy, Czar Nicholas, and Anna Karenina. Goldman’s written corpus is evidence of this fascination with history. Although best known for this play, The Lion in Winter, and the screenplay for the resultant movie, Goldman was a prolific writer who based many of his novels, plays, and screenplays on history, a subject he dearly loved. Long before the term “dysfunctional” was commonly applied to families, James Goldman gave the world a glimpse of this age-old phenomenon by creating for the stage the members of England’s original Plantaganet family: King Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their sons.

The Lion in Winter by James Goldman