Frederic Michael Raphael (born 14 August 1931) is an American-British BAFTA and Academy Award winning screenwriter, biographer, nonfiction writer, novelist and journalist.
Frederic Raphael | |
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Born | (1931-08-14) 14 August 1931 (age 91) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
Alma mater | St John's College, Cambridge |
Occupation | Novelist, screenwriter, journalist, biographer |
Years active | 1956–present |
Spouse(s) | Sylvia Betty Glatt (1955–present) |
Children | 3, including Sarah Raphael |
Awards | Academy Award, BAFTA, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature |
Raphael was born in Chicago,[1] to an American Jewish mother from Chicago, Irene Rose (nee Mauser) and a British Jewish father, Cederic Michael Raphael, an employee of the Shell Oil Company who had been transferred to the United States from Shell's London office.[2][3] In 1938, when Raphael was seven, and to his surprise, the family migrated to England[1] and settled in Putney, London. He was educated at Copthorne Preparatory School, Charterhouse School, and St John's College, Cambridge.[4]
Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the movie Darling (1965), and two years later received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1967 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd directed by John Schlesinger.
His articles and book reviews appear in a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and The Sunday Times. He has published more than twenty novels, the best-known being the semi-autobiographical The Glittering Prizes (1976), which traces the lives of a group of Cambridge University undergraduates in post-war Britain as they move through university and into the wider world. The original six-part BBC television series, from which the book was adapted, won him a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award.[5] The sequel, Fame and Fortune, which continues the story to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2010, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a further sequel in a series entitled Final Demands, with Tom Conti as Adam Morris, the central character, bringing the story to the late 1990s.
Raphael has published several history books, collections of essays and translations. He has also written biographies of Somerset Maugham and Lord Byron. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964.[6]
In 1999, Raphael published Eyes Wide Open, a memoir of his collaboration with the director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final movie. Raphael wrote a detailed account of his working with Kubrick, based on his own journals, but upon its publication the book was publicly criticised by several of the director's friends and family members, among them Christiane Kubrick,[7] Jan Harlan,[8] and Michael Herr[9][self-published source], for its unflattering portrayal of him.
Referring to an article by Raphael about his book in the New Yorker, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise also professed criticism.[10][11]
That year, Penguin Books published a new translation of Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story, the basis for Eyes Wide Shut, featuring a new introduction by Raphael.
He married Sylvia Betty Glatt on 17 January 1955, and they had three children. His daughter, Sarah Raphael, was an English artist known for her portraits. She died in 2001.
Year | Title | Director | Notes |
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1958 | Bachelor of Hearts | Wolf Rilla | |
1964 | Nothing but the Best | Clive Donner | Nominated for Edgar Allan Poe Award Best Foreign Film |
1965 | Darling | John Schlesinger | Won Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay Won BAFTA Film Award for Best British Screenplay |
1967 | Far from the Madding Crowd | John Schlesinger | |
1967 | Two for the Road | Stanley Donen | Nominated for Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay Nominated for BAFTA Film Award for Best British Screenplay |
1970 | A Severed Head | Dick Clement | |
1974 | Daisy Miller | Peter Bogdanovich | |
1976 | The Glittering Prizes (TV series) | ||
1976 | Rogue Male (TV) | Clive Donner | |
1980 | Richard's Things | Anthony Harvey | Based on his novel |
1984 | Oxbridge Blues (TV series) | Won CableACE Award for Best Writing a Dramatic Series. Based on his short story collection Sleeps Six and other stories (1979). | |
1990 | After the War (TV series) | Based on his novel | |
1990 | The King's Whore | Axel Corti | |
1991 | Women and Men: Stories of Seduction (TV) | Self directed | Segment "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit" |
1999 | Eyes Wide Shut | Stanley Kubrick | |
2003 | Coast to Coast | Paul Mazursky | Based on his novel. |
General | |
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National libraries | |
Biographical dictionaries | |
Other |