Michael Parker

Michael Parker (1935-2019) was active in the theatre almost all his life. At age 14, in England, where he was born and raised, he won the title role in a regional production of Terence Rattigan’s play The Winslow Boy, for which he received a Best Actor of the Year award. By age 17, he was touring with The National Shakespearean Youth Company. He graduated in the top 3% of his class from The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, but described his five years of military service as “uneventful.” There being few employment opportunities in civilian life for infantry anti-tank specialists, at age 23 he emigrated to Canada, where he began a Temporary Office Help business, which proved so successful that he was able to retire ten years later and move to the Caribbean.

Over the succeeding years, while living in Bermuda, Grand Cayman and The Turks and Caicos Islands, he was free again to indulge his passion for the theatre. Never far from The United States, he was able to audition for roles in many Florida theatres. As an English actor working in America, Mr. Parker became acutely aware of the difficulties experienced by American theatre companies in producing English works, in particular modern farces. Re-creating the wide range of English dialects is almost impossible, and many of the best farces simply do not “translate” well into “American.” So he challenged himself to write a play which would integrate all the best loved and most familiar devices of the traditional British farce into a distinctly American setting. This had to be a play in which the verbal, visual and, above all, circumstantial humor would be immediately available to American audiences.

The result was an “American farce,” The Sensuous Senator, which was inspired by the then-current sex scandal involving Senator Gary Hart. Encouraged by the success of his first play and the popularity of the British “naughty but nice” concept, he went on to write a sequel called The Amorous Ambassador. The rest, as they say, is history.

He wrote The Lone Star Love Potion in 1999, Hotbed Hotel in 2000, There’s a Burglar in My Bed and Whose Wives Are They Anyway? in 2002, Who’s In Bed with the Butler? in 2003, and Never Kiss a Naughty Nanny in 2006. With his wife Susan, he co-authored the plays Sin, Sex & the CIA (2006), Sex Please We’re Sixty! (2008), What is Susan’s Secret? (2010), Money Matters (2014), Love, Lies & the Doctor’s Dilemma (2016) and Sandy Toes & Salty Kisses (2018).