Tabori was born in
Budapest as György Tábori, a son of Kornél (Cornelius) and Elsa Tábori. He was raised as a Catholic, and was only told about his Jewish origin when he was seven years old. His father Kornél was murdered in
Auschwitz in 1944, but his mother and his brother Paul Tabori (writer and psychical researcher), managed to escape the Nazis. As a young man, Tabori travelled to
Berlin but was forced to leave
Nazi Germany in 1935 because of his
Jewish background. He first went to London, where he worked for the
BBC and received British citizenship. In 1947 he emigrated to the United States, where he became a translator (mainly of works by
Bertolt Brecht and
Max Frisch) and a screenwriter including Alfred Hitchcock's movie
I Confess (1953). His first novel,
Beneath The Stone, was published in America in 1945. In the late 1960s, Tabori brought his own and the work of Brecht to many colleges and universities. At the
University of Pennsylvania he taught classes in dramatic writing which resulted in Werner Liepolt's
The Young Master Dante and
Ron Cowen's
Summertree. His play
The Niggerlovers debuted in 1967 starring
Morgan Freeman and
Stacy Keach. Two of Tabori's plays in English --
The Cannibals and
Pinkville—were produced by
Wynn Handman at the
American Place Theatre in New York City from 1968 through 1970. His play
The Prince was filmed by
John Boorman as
Leo the Last (1970) with
Marcello Mastroianni and
Billie Whitelaw; the film won the Director's Prize at the
Cannes Film Festival in that year. During his period in America, Tabori married
Viveca Lindfors. In addition to his own child, Lena, with Lindfors, Tabori adopted Lindfors' two sons (from her marriage to film director
Don Siegel), John and
Kristoffer. Kristoffer later became an actor and Lena a publisher. In 1971, Tabori moved to
West Germany, where his new emphasis was theater work, and mainly worked in West Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. His 1991
Goldberg Variations is a satirical farce based on Biblical stories which end in disaster. in Berlin He died in Berlin, aged 93. ==Plays==