John Francis Lane (1 December 1928 – 15 January 2018)[2] was an English journalist, critic and actor.
[1] Lane was born in Tankerton, a suburb of Whitstable in Kent, to a middle-class family in 1928.
He became a boarder at the Royal Grammar School in Worcester, and towards the end of the Second World War attended Dulwich College in London.
After learning Italian at the University of Florence, he had settled in Rome by 1951, finding Italy more tolerant of his homosexuality than the Britain of the time.
[1][4] Learning Italian in Florence, he became entranced by the country after seeing Franco Zeffirelli's production of Troilus and Cressida.