He was the official biographer of Sir John Gielgud and wrote biographies of many other theatrical figures he had known, including Noël Coward.
[2] He was named after Sheridan Whiteside, the title role his father was playing in a long-running production of The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Savoy Theatre in London.
His godparents were the dramatist Sewell Stokes and the actor Peter Bull; Morley's son Hugo was one of Noël Coward's many godchildren.
This was owned and run in laissez-faire style by a Dutch Quaker, Harry Tuyn, although the story told in Morley's obituaries that subjects such as maths and Latin were not taught at Sizewell Hall on the grounds that they were too boring is untrue.
[4] Having attended a crammer in Kensington High Street, Morley went on to read modern languages at Merton College, Oxford, from 1960,[5] and became involved in student drama alongside Michael York, David Wood, Sam Walters, and Oliver Ford Davies.
Coward gave his full blessing, providing Morley with a list of his friends, and another of his enemies, telling him to start with the second first – which would make for a better book.
Morley's life was posthumously celebrated on 22 May 2007 with a gala afternoon performance at the Gielgud Theatre,[7] organised by his widow Ruth Leon, with contributions and performances by friends and colleagues, including Liz Robertson, Edward Fox, Jenny Seagrove, Cameron Mackintosh, Patricia Hodge, Michael Law and Annabel Leventon.
[9] The Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography, last won by Stephen Sondheim in 2012,[10] was founded in his memory but ceased to function in 2014.
[12] In 2011, Leon published a memoir of her husband, But What Comes After..., in which she stated that Morley suffered a stroke in November 2002, the effects of which exacerbated a bipolar disorder.