Pulitzer-winning US playwright Edward Albee, author of masterpieces such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at age 88.Considered one of the most important American playwrights of his time, Albee wrote a variety of intense, controversial plays diving into anxieties, disillusionments and death.

• He burst onto the theatre scene with The Zoo Story (1958) at age 30. The two-character drama, portraying disaffection and class struggle, premiered in Berlin the following year and then moved to off-Broadway in 1960.

• It was later made into a 1966 black-comedy movie directed by Mike Nichols and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who won an Oscar as best actress.

• Edward Harvey born on March 12, 1928, in the U.S. capital Washington, Albee was given up for adoption shortly afterward.

• His adoptive parents, Reed and Francis Albee, were wealthy from businesses in vaudeville and motion pictures and changed his name to Edward Franklin Albee III, according to the Edward Albee Society.

• Albee had a troubled relationship with his parents and was expelled from several private preparatory schools, and also was expelled from Trinity College in Connecticut. He moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s, finding a more sympathetic environment in the avant-garde scene, where he wrote The Zoo Story that marked his breakthrough in theatre.