British naturalistic playwright of the middle classes. The son of a diplomat, he was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Oxford. He began his playwright career early, driven by an ultimatum from his father who enabled him to write over a period of two years to see if he could made a career of playwriting.

His work ranged from the comedy French Without Tears (1936), his first success, to The Browning Version (1948). He was knighted in 1971. Other work include The Winslow Boy (1946), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), Separate Tables (1954), Ross (1960), and Cause Célèbre (1977).

Rattigan kept his private life and sexual identity private, partly because of the fear of a public scandal. Though he lived with men like Kenneth Morgan for periods of time, his love was not always met with the same ardour by those whom he fell in love with, and that experience is recorded, albeith in heterosexual, coded form, in his plays.