Rafael Sabatini

Rafael Sabatini
Born 29 April 1875
Iesi, Italy
Died 13 February 1950 (aged 74)
Adelboden, Switzerland
Occupation Novelist
Nationality Italian / English
Genre romance, adventure
Notable works Scaramouche, Captain Blood

Rafael Sabatini (29 April 1875 – 13 February 1950) was an Italian/English writer of novels of romance and adventure.[1]

He is best known for his worldwide best-sellers:

In all, Sabatini produced thirty-one novels, eight short story collections, six non-fiction books, numerous uncollected short stories, and a play.

Biography

Rafael Sabatini was born in Iesi, Italy, to an English mother (Anna Trafford) and Italian father. His parents were opera singers who became teachers.[1]

At a young age, Rafael was exposed to many languages, living with his grandfather in England, attending school in Portugal and, as a teenager, in Switzerland. By the time he was seventeen, when he returned to England to live permanently, he was the master of five languages. He quickly added a sixth language – English – to his linguistic collection. He consciously chose to write in his adopted language, because, he said, "all the best stories are written in English."[2]

After a brief stint in the business world, Sabatini went to work as a writer. He wrote short stories in the 1890s, and his first novel came out in 1902. In 1905 he married Ruth Goad Dixon, the daughter of a Liverpool merchant. It took Sabatini roughly a quarter of a century of hard work before he attained success with Scaramouche in 1921. The novel, a historical romantic set during the French Revolution, became an international best-seller. It was followed by the equally successful Captain Blood in 1922. All of his earlier books were rushed into reprints, the most popular of which was The Sea Hawk from 1915. Sabatini was a prolific writer; he produced a new book approximately every year, and maintained a great deal of popularity with the reading public through the decades that followed.[1]

Several of his novels were adapted into films during the silent era, and the first three of these books were made into notable films in the sound era, in 1940, 1952, and 1935 respectively. His third novel was made into a famous "lost" film, Bardelys the Magnificent, directed in 1926 by King Vidor with John Gilbert in the lead, and long viewable only in a fragment excerpted in Vidor's silent comedy Show People. A few intact reels have recently been discovered in Europe. The fully restored version premiered on TCM on 11 January 2010.

Two silent adaptations of Sabatini novels which do survive intact are Rex Ingram's Scaramouche (1923) starring Ramón Novarro, and The Sea Hawk (1924) directed by Frank Lloyd and starring Milton Sills. The 1940 film of the same name, with Errol Flynn, is not a remake – but a wholly new story which just used the title. A 1924 silent version of Captain Blood, starring J. Warren Kerrigan, is partly lost, surviving only in an incomplete copy in the Library of Congress. The Black Swan was filmed in 1942 starring Tyrone Power and Maureen O'Hara.

Personal life

His only son, Rafael-Angelo (nicknamed Binkie), was killed in a car crash on 1 April 1927. In 1931, he and his wife Ruth divorced. Later that year he moved from London to Clifford, Herefordshire, near Hay-on-Wye. In 1935 he married the sculptor Christine Dixon (née Wood), his former sister-in-law. They suffered further tragedy when Christine's son, Lancelot Dixon, was killed in a flying accident. On the day he received his RAF wings, he flew his airplane over their house, but the plane went out of control and crashed in flames right before their eyes.[1]

By the 1940s, illness forced the writer to slow his prolific method of composition, though he did write several additional works even during that time.

Sabatini died in Switzerland February 13, 1950 . He was buried in Adelboden, Switzerland. On his headstone his wife had written, "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad", the first line of Scaramouche.

Works

Series

Scaramouche

Captain Blood

Novels

Collections

Posthumous collections

Plays

Anthologies edited

Nonfiction

Notes

  1. ↑ Most of the stories were woven together by the author to form Captain Blood, and two that were not were included in Captain Blood Returns.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 N.B. Captain Blood Returns and The Fortunes of Captain Blood are not sequels, but collections of short stories set entirely within the timeframe of the original novel.
  3. ↑ One of the stories from this collection, "The Treasure Ship", was reprinted as a standalone paperback in 2004.
  4. ↑ Includes several stories about Alessandro Cagliostro, and one connected to Captain Blood.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 The Historical Nights' Entertainment stories are 'factions' – truth so far as anyone knows it, embellished with imagination. Some are actually apocryphal, not even history.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 "Sabatini, Rafael". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37926. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ↑ Knight, Jesse F.; Darley, Stephen (2010). The Last of the Great Swashbucklers: A Bio-Bibliography of Rafael Sabatini. New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll. ISBN 9781584562795.

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Rafael Sabatini
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