Frederic Raphael

Frederic Raphael
Born August 14, 1931 (1931-08-14) (age 80)
Chicago, Illinois, United States

Frederic Michael Raphael (born August 14, 1931) is an American-born, British-educated screenwriter, and also a prolific novelist and journalist.

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Life and career

Raphael was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Irene Rose (née Mauser) and Cedric Michael Raphael, an employee of the Shell Oil Co.[1] With his parents, he emigrated to Putney, England in 1938.

Education

Raphael was educated at two independent schools, Copthorne Preparatory School, near Crawley in West Sussex, and Charterhouse School (Lockites) in Godalming in Surrey, and then at St John's College at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge.

Life and career

Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling, 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.[2] Fame and Fortune, which continues the story to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, television channels having refused to commission the sequel themselves. 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 also 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.

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. Upon its publication, the book was publicly discredited by several of Kubrick's friends and family members, among them Christiane Kubrick[3], Jan Harlan[4], Michael Herr[5], Steven Spielberg[6] and Tom Cruise[7]. Studio executives at Warner Bros. responded to the book's publication by refusing to allow Raphael to attend the Eyes Wide Shut premiere.[8]

That same year, Penguin Books also published a new translation of Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story, the basis for Eyes Wide Shut, featuring an introduction by Raphael.

He married Sylvia Betty Glatt on January 17, 1955 and their children are Paul Simon a film producer, Sarah Natasha (1960–2001) who was a painter, and Stephen Matthew Joshua a screenwriter.

Works

Fiction

Nonfiction

Screenplays (partial list)

References

External links