Trivia

Shaw and his wife were vacationing at an English seaside resort when someone told them that Harpo Marx was nude-sunbathing, down on the beach. Shaw and his wife immediately went to the beach and surprised Marx in the act. This began their long friendship.

First person to receive a Nobel Prize and an Oscar (Pygmalion (1938)). When songwriter Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, he became the second person.

When his house at Ayot St Lawrence became a museum his Oscar statuette was so tarnished the curator, believing it had no value, used it as a door stop.

It is a common joke among fans of the Board Game "Trivial Pursuit" that "When in doubt, the answer is George Bernard Shaw!".

Appears on sleeve of The Beatles' "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club".

A longtime friend of Harpo Marx.

His will left a small fortune to be used to develop a precise English alphabet of 40 letters to replace the current one. Someone created it, but it never caught on.

Died from kidney failure, which was complicated by injuries he received after falling from a ladder, while he was trimming a tree on his estate.

Nobel Prize for Literature 1925.

Unlike other prominent authors, GBS refused to sell the screen rights to his plays, but would only license them for renewable five-year periods - thus his first major film, the successful Arms and the Man (1932) (for which he also wrote the screenplay, as he did the later Pascal productions - winning an Best Screenplay Oscar in 1938 for his adaptation of "Pygmalion") is today a "lost" film because its license was not renewed due to Shaw's feeling that by 1937 advances in sound technology made the 1932 sound too archaic.

With that exception, until 1938, film versions of his plays were either unauthorized by him or had not met with his approval. He supervised, wrote the screenplays for, and had creative control over three film versions of his plays-- the Pygmalion (1938), the Major Barbara (1941), and the Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). He agreed to cut some of the dialogue for the "Pygmalion", and it turned out to be the most cinematic of the three films that he was involved with, but he added entire scenes to "Major Barbara" while becoming more sensitive to the idea of having to cut his dialogue, and "Caesar and Cleopatra" was filmed intact, with only minor additions. "Caesar and Cleopatra" was the first authorized film of a Shaw play to receive some harsh criticism, but it has become a classic since its original release. Shaw also prepared a screenplay for his play, "Saint Joan", unproduced in his lifetime, but closely adapted by Graham Greene for the 1957 Otto Preminger production half a decade after Shaw's death.

Unfortunately, Shaw's system of five-year licenses, while not benefiting less high profile playwrights (and fortunately only resulting in one major lost Shaw film), inspired later copyright attorneys who used it as a template to license film clips to documentary and other film makers, making the reissue of older documentaries and films a nightmare of rights clearance issues.

He used the pseudonyms "GBS" and "Corno di Bassetto" as a columnist.

In 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War One, he wrote a pacifist tract entitled "Common Sense About the War." Among other things, this argued that, if imperial Germany lost, it should not be humiliated and burdened vindictively with an immense war debt, as ultimately this would only lead to another global conflict.

Is the great uncle of author, actor and filmmaker Scott Shaw.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". Volume 105, pg. 371-378. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, Inc., 1990.

His play, "Heartbreak House" at the Writers' Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for the 2011 Equity Joseph Jefferson Award for Production of a Play (Large).

Born at 12:30am-LMT.

[Marlon Brando on Shaw] Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage.

He was of mostly Scottish ancestry with some English and Irish ancestry.

"Major Barbara" at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre was awarded the 1971 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Distinguished Production.