Michael Gurr
Australian playwright
Michael Gurr (29 October 1961 – 2 May 2017) was an Australian actor, playwright, author, speech writer and screenwriter.
Early life
Gurr was born in East Malvern, in Melbourne where his father was a kidney doctor at the Alfred Hospital and his mother was a nurse. He was the second of five children.
His first published work was a fictional poem at age 10, from the point of view of a paraplegic, which unintentionally earned him a donation from a Herald Sun reader.
Career
Gurr studied at the National Theatre Drama School (NTDS) in St Kilda, Victoria, and while there wrote a number of short plays, which were sent to Ray Lawler, then Literary Advisor to the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC). In 1982 Gurr was invited to be Writer in Residence at the MTC and it was there that his first plays were produced.
His best-known plays include Crazy Brave and Sex Diary of an Infidel.
He worked as a speechwriter for a number of years for John Brumby and Steve Bracks, both of whom became Labor Premiers of Victoria.
He died on 2 May 2017. He is survived by his four siblings and his partner Brandon Hardie Jones.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Gurr” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.