Terence Greer

Greer was born in Surbiton, Surrey, UK, and educated in private schools in Kew and Richmond. His mother took him often to the cinema, which he credits as a strong visual influence: "Being plunged into the world of James Cagney and the 30s American dreamworld strongly affected the way I saw things." Picasso's drawings were another important influence. After leaving school in 1947, he did his National Service in the Royal Air Force. After 1949, he studied at Saint Martin's School of Art, Twickenham School of Art, and, for three years, at the Royal Academy of Arts. A photograph of him as a young man by Lewis Morley, a contemporary and friend from Twickenham School of Art, "Terence Greer, Playwright, outside Gare St. Lazare, Paris, 1952", is held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

As magazines replaced illustrations with photographs, he moved to writing plays. His first play, Ripper!, was staged in 1973 at the Half Moon Theatre in its first home, a former Whitechapel synagogue. Ripper! was musical version of the Jack the Ripper story, which was performed in a music hall setting a few hundred yards from the scene of one of the actual murders in 1888. Other plays were performed at the Bush Theatre in Shepherd's Bush (Nobody Knew They Were There, 1975), the Mountview Theatre, now in the Mountview Academy, in Crouch End (The Lay Figure, 1975) and the Young Vic (Ballroom, 1978). Greer was commissioned to adapt a story, "The Psychrons", for the popular BBC series Doctor Who in 1981, but, like many other adaptations, it went unmade.

After a period in Australia, where he continued to write, he moved to Victoria, British Columbia in 1993 with his wife, Sneja Gunew, who became a professor at the University of Victoria. She moved to a professorship at the University of British Columbia in 1995. He died in Vancouver in 2020.