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Biography
George Laurier Lister, OBE (22 April 1907 – 30 September 1986) was a British theatre writer, actor, director and producer, best known for his series of revues in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Laurier Lister was born in Croydon, Surrey. In the 1930s he acted in a number of plays in the West End, including Death Takes a Holiday (1931), The Long Christmas Dinner (1933), Twelfth Night (1933), Cabbages and Kings (1933), Hervey House (1934), A Kiss for Cinderella (1937), and People of Our Class (1938). He also wrote, with Hilda Vaughan, She Too Was Young, a romantic comedy set in Wales in the 1870s, which had 110 performances in London in 1938.
In the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force, and after the war became involved as a theatre director in London. His series of successful revues, either as director or producer, included Tuppence Coloured (1947), Oranges and Lemons (1949), Penny Plain (1951), Airs on a Shoestring (1953), Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure (1954), and From Here and There (1955).
In 1965 he became the first Director of the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, and was awarded the OBE in 1976.
He had a lengthy personal relationship with the actor Max Adrian, with whom he also often worked. Lister died in 1986, aged 79.