Peter Morgan
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Peter Morgan | |||||||||||||||
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Born | April 10, 1963 London, England |
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Years active | 1988 - present | ||||||||||||||
Spouse(s) | Lila Schwarzenberg | ||||||||||||||
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Peter Morgan (born April 10, 1963 in London) is an English Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning screenwriter and playwright. He had written scripts throughout the 1990s but broke through with The Deal, a 2003 television drama about the power-sharing deal between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that was struck in the Granita restaurant in London. He received an Oscar nomination for The Deal's follow-up The Queen, a 2006 film starring Helen Mirren that showed the impact of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales on the British royal family.
Also in 2006, Morgan's first play Frost/Nixon was staged at the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London. Starring Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella as Richard Nixon, the play concerns the series of televised interviews that the disgraced former president granted Frost in 1977 and that ended with a tacit admission of guilt regarding his role in the Watergate scandal. The play was directed by Michael Grandage and opened to enthusiastic reviews.
Morgan was born in London, the son of refugees; his father Arthur Morgenthau was a German Jew who fled the Nazis, and his mother Inga, a Catholic Pole who fled the Soviets. He gained a degree in Fine Art from the University of Leeds and lived in Battersea, south London, with his Austrian wife Lila Schwarzenberg and their daughters and three sons. Peter Morgan and his family relocated to Vienna in the winter of 2006.
In January 2007, Morgan earned a Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press for his work on The Queen. During his acceptance speech, he called Queen Elizabeth II a "stubborn seventy year old woman" and wondered aloud what it would take for leaders to listen to their people when it concerns something of real importance. He subsequently admitted that "As far as I am aware, I wrote about a cold, emotionally detached, haughty, difficult, prickly, private, uncommunicative, out-of-touch bigot".
In February 2007, Morgan won a BAFTA for his adapted screenplay to The Last King of Scotland, alongside fellow scribe Jeremy Brock.
On May 5, 2007, the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival honoured Peter Morgan with this year's Kanbar Award for Excellence in Screenwriting.
On October 2, 2007, it was announced that Morgan was working on a sequel to The Queen. Michael Sheen will be reprising his role as Tony Blair. The film will focus on Blair's relationship with U.S presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
He attended Mrs. Henderson's Kindergarten in Wimbledon Village, along with actor Martin Clunes.
In 2008 he started work adapting John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy into a screenplay for Working Title Films.[1]
[edit] References
- ^ Martin, Francesca. "Tinker, tailor, soldier, film star", The Guardian, 2008-06-04. Retrieved on 2008-06-04.