[7] Orton attended Marriot Road Primary School but failed the eleven-plus exam after extended bouts of asthma, and so took a secretarial course at Clark's College in Leicester from 1945 to 1947.

While working on amateur productions he was determined to improve his appearance and physique, buying bodybuilding courses, taking elocution lessons.

From January 1959, Orton and Halliwell began surreptitiously to remove books from several local public libraries and modify the cover art or the blurbs before returning them.

A volume of poems by Sir John Betjeman was returned to the library with a new dust jacket featuring a photograph of a nearly naked, heavily tattooed middle-aged man.

[11] At a further hearing in May 1962 they pleaded guilty to further joint charges of theft and criminal damage, and were sentenced to prison for six months, with fines of £2 each.

[14] Prison was a crucial formative experience; the isolation from Halliwell allowed Orton to break free of him creatively; and he saw what he considered the corruption, priggishness, and double standards of a purportedly liberal country.

"[15] The book covers Orton and Halliwell vandalised have since become a valued part of the Islington Local History Centre collection.

[20] Entertaining Mr Sloane lost money in its three-week run, but critical praise from playwright Terence Rattigan, who invested £3,000 in it, ensured its survival.

Within a year, Sloane was performed in New York, Spain, Israel, and Australia as well as made into a film (after Orton's death) and a television play.

The first draft was written from June to October 1964 and was called Funeral Games, a title Orton dropped at Halliwell's suggestion but later reused.

The play is a wild parody of detective fiction, adding the blackest farce and jabs at established ideas on death, the police, religion, and justice.

Orton offered the play to Codron in October 1964 and it underwent sweeping rewrites before it was judged fit for the West End.

Orton, disagreeing with director Peter Wood over the plot, produced 133 pages of new material to replace, or add to, the original 90.

[28] Over the next ten months, he revised The Ruffian on the Stair and The Erpingham Camp for the stage as a double called Crimes of Passion, wrote Funeral Games, the screenplay Up Against It for the Beatles, and his final full-length play, What the Butler Saw.

The Erpingham Camp, Orton's take on The Bacchae, written through mid-1965 and offered to Associated-Rediffusion in October of that year, was broadcast on 27 June 1966 as the "pride" segment in their series Seven Deadly Sins.

A one-act television play, it was completed by June 1964 but first broadcast by Associated-Rediffusion on 6 April 1967, representing "faith" in the series Seven Deadly Virtues.

Rediffusion did not use the play; instead, it was made as one of the first productions of the new ITV company Yorkshire Television, and broadcast posthumously in the Playhouse series on 26 August 1968, five weeks after an adaptation of Mr Sloane.

[32][33] In March 1967, Orton and Halliwell had intended another extended holiday in Libya, but they returned home after one day because the only hotel accommodation they could find was a boat that had been converted into a hotel/nightclub.

It opened in March at the Queen's Theatre with Sir Ralph Richardson, Coral Browne, Stanley Baxter and Hayward Morse.

[36] In 1970, The Sunday Times reported that four days before the murder, Orton had told a friend that he wanted to end his relationship with Halliwell, but did not know how to go about it.

The bodies were discovered the following morning when a chauffeur arrived to take Orton to a meeting with director Richard Lester to discuss filming options on Up Against It.

This is presumed to be a reference to Orton's description of his promiscuity; the diary contains numerous incidents of cottaging in public lavatories and other casual sexual encounters with teenagers, including with rent boys on holiday in North Africa.

[38] Orton was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium, his maroon cloth-draped coffin being brought into the west chapel to a recording of The Beatles song "A Day in the Life".

[43] Directed by Stephen Frears, it stars Gary Oldman as Orton, Alfred Molina as Halliwell, and Vanessa Redgrave as Peggy Ramsay.

The campaign enjoyed prominent support from the acting community, including from Sheila Hancock, Kenneth Cranham, Ian McKellen and Alec Baldwin.

[53] Although the fundraising target was met, the project was cancelled in 2022, with the organisers citing pandemic challenges and changing attitudes to statues in Britain.