Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp was an English raconteur, writer and performer who made a career out of a flamboyant personal style and sharp opinions about manners. Born in Sutton in 1908, Crisp left a job as an engineer's tracer in 1942 and worked for around thirty years as a model for life classes in art colleges. Interviews about that unusual life drew great curiosity, and Crisp became sought after for opinions about social behavior and the cultivation of style. The memoir The Naked Civil Servant, published in 1968, received generally good reviews, and its 1975 screen adaptation of the same name brought wider notice. A one-man stage show was a hit over many years in Britain and America, selling out the Duke of York's Theatre in London in 1978. Crisp moved to New York in 1981, kept performing, wrote books on contemporary manners and contributed film reviews and columns. Crisp died in 1999.