Former Standard Critic Shulman Dies, Aged 90

Milton Shulman, theatre critic of the Evening Standard for four decades from 1953 to 1991, has died, aged 90. In a long career as a writer, historian, and critic of film, television and books as well as theatre, he also did stints as a television producer and made regular radio appearances on Radio 4’s Stop the Week.

Born in Toronto in 1913 to parents who were poor Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, he trained as a lawyer and was called to the Canadian Bar, where he practised from 1937 to 1940. But soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, he volunteered to serve in the Canadian Army, joining the Armoured Corps and moving into Intelligence work, charting the position and strength of the German forces. After the war ended, he was retained to interrogate German commanders of the war; and the war became the subject of his first book, Defeat in the West, published in 1947, the first book to tell the story of the war from the German point of view and detailing the strategic blunders that lost Hitler the war.

The book – which was an instant success at the time and was re-published in
1995 – made his name, and effected his entry into journalism. He launched his career at the Evening Standard in 1947 as a feature writer and worked on the Londoner’s Diary. The following year, proprietor Lord Beaverbrook – a fellow Canadian – appointed him film critic of the paper, a role in which he continued to 1958, while in 1953 he simultaneously succeeded Kenneth Tynan as the paper’s theatre critic.

It is for the latter role that he became best known, reviewing over 5,000 shows in all in a career that continued to 1991. As a critic, he was renowned more for the detailed exposition of plot than for the excitement of his prose or the frequently negative judgements it contained. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, for instance, was dismissed as “a self-pitying snivel”, and he continued, “nothing is so comforting to the young as the opportunity to feel sorry for themselves.”

Shulman continued to review film for the Sunday Express and Vogue magazine (which his daughter Alexandra would subsequently become editor of the British edition of), as well as television and books, throughout his career; and from 1958 to 1962 was a producer for Granada Television and from 1962 to 1964, assistant controller of programmes for Rediffusion.

In 1991, he was replaced as theatre critic of the Evening Standard by Nicholas de Jongh. In 1998, he published his memoirs, Marilyn, Hitler and Me, and a year later, an anthology of bon mots, Voltaire, Goldberg and Others. He died on 21 May, 2004, and is survived by his wife Drusilla, son Jason and two daughters, both also journalists, Alexandra and Nicola.

– Mark Shenton