Three of the awards are given in the names of former
Standard notables: • Arts editor Sydney Edwards (who conceived the awards, and died suddenly in July 1979) for the Best Director category. • Editor
Charles Wintour (who as deputy-editor in 1955, launched the awards after a nod from the proprietor,
Lord Beaverbrook') for Most Promising Playwright. • Long-serving theatre critic
Milton Shulman (for several years a key member of the judging panel) for the Outstanding Newcomer award. In 1980, noting the first use of the Special Award category, Shulman observed that "In 1968 the judges felt that Alan Bennett's work
Forty Years On did not fit either the category of a Play or a Musical. But since they liked it so much they gave him the coveted Dobson statuette as a Special Award. In a quarter of a century, only in 1968 had no-one been designated as 'Promising' although it could conceivably be argued that Alan Bennett's Special Award was a reasonable substitute for this category." The Special Award process came to a climax in 2004 when, in the 50th anniversary year, the category was used to signal peaks of accomplishment by the
National Theatre (an institution),
Harold Pinter (a playwright) and Dame
Judi Dench (a performer). The Patricia Rothermere Award, presented biennially from 1999 to 2005, was created to honour the memory of
Patricia Harmsworth, Viscountess Rothermere, wife of
Viscount Rothermere, chairman of the
Daily Mail and General Trust, which formerly owned the
Standard. The two part award recognised those who had given outstanding support to young actors, while also providing a three-year scholarship award for a drama student. In 2009, the Special Award was given in the name of
Evgeny Lebedev, executive director of the
Standard. Commencing in 2009, the Best Actress award was renamed in tribute to
Natasha Richardson, who died after a skiing accident in Quebec in March 2009. ==Winners==