Biography

In the 1930s, he was the lover of the playwright Terence Rattigan and made his film debut in the movie version of Rattigan's first theatrical success, "French Without Tears". His relationship with Rattigan was a tortured one, especially as the latter was far more successful, and it was the indirect basis for a famous Rattigan play written after his suicide, "The Deep Blue Sea". The play. and its subsequent film versions, changes the relationship to a heterosexual one, and the truth was not made public until Rattigan's own death in the late 1970s.

Mike Poulton's play, inspired by The Deep Blue Sea (which coincidentally opened on 8 June is on at the National Theatre until August) looks at Kenny Morgan's final day, which opens with a failed suicide attempt and ends with Morgan concluding the act. It is a story of love, mostly the lack of it as well as a look at Post war England. The doctor (played exceptionally by George Irving) who initially saves Morgan is a Jewish Austrian doctor, who has been struck off.

The actor Kenny Morgan was Terence Rattigan's secret lover for almost 10 years.

The suicide of Kenneth Morgan heavily inspired Rattigan's acclaimed 1952 play "The Deep Blue Sea". Because homosexuality was criminalized in post-war Britain, Rattigan disguised the tragedy by making the central suicidal character a woman (Hester Collyer).

Morgan left Rattigan for a volatile relationship with a younger man, which led to mounting personal and financial distress. This man treated him badly, and so h took his own life in front of a gas fire.