Profile

Before becoming a full-time writer I worked for many years in publishing, as an editor with Penguin, Oxford University Press, and Writers and Readers. As a journalist I have written for the Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, Listener, Spectator and Vole magazine. I have also been features editor of the Times Educational Supplement, co-founder and editor of Arts Express magazine, editor of the National Theatre’s magazine StageWrite, programme editor at the Old Vic theatre, and contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography.

My 26 books cover theatre, film, history, education, and the environment, and include biographies of John Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike, AS Neill, and my father, the actor John Stuart.  My most recent books are All is Fortune and Other Theatre Stories (see Fiction), and From Silent Film Idol to Superman: The Life and Career of John Stuart (see Biography).

My present focus is on play writing. I am working on two plays: Silent Idol, about my father’s years as a silent-film star, and After Gatsby, which deals with Scott Fitzgerald’s desperate attempt to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood. In 2025 the Shaw Society staged a reading of my play Finding Saint Joan, which is about the working relationship between Bernard Shaw and Sybil Thorndike as they prepare to stage the first production of Shaw’s famous play. Meanwhile I have written an essay on ‘Lilian Baylis, William Shakespeare and the Old Vic Theatre’, one of 14 essays contributing to the book British Theatre and the 1920s, to be published by Manchester University Press in 2026.

You can contact me at jcroall2019@gmail.com