Ronald Harwood


Sir Ronald Harwood was a South African-born British author, playwright, and screenwriter, best known for his plays for the British stage as well as the screenplays for The Dresser and The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Early life and career

Harwood was born Ronald Horwitz in Cape Town, in what was then the Union of South Africa, the son of Isobel and Isaac Horwitz. After attending Sea Point High School, Harwood moved from Cape Town to London in 1951 to pursue a career in the theatre. He changed his surname from Horwitz to Harwood after an English master told him it was too foreign and too Jewish for a stage actor.
After training for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he joined the Shakespeare Company of Sir Donald Wolfit. From 1953 to 1958, Harwood was Sir Donald's personal dresser. He later drew on this experience when he wrote the stage play The Dresser and the biography Sir Donald Wolfit CBE: His Life and Work in the Unfashionable Theatre. In 1959, after leaving the Donald Wolfit Company, Harwood joined the 59 Theatre Company for a season at the Lyric Hammersmith, during which he played the role of Pablo both in the stage debut of Alun Owen's play The Rough and Ready Lot and in its 1959 television adaptation.
In 1960 Harwood began a career as a writer. He published his first novel, All the Same Shadows, in 1961, the screenplay for Private Potter from his television drama, and the stage play March Hares in 1964. Harwood continued at a prolific pace, writing more than 21 stage plays and 10 books. He also created more than 16 screen plays, but seldom wrote original material directly for the screen, usually acting as an adapter, sometimes of his own work, as with The Dresser.
One of the recurring themes in Harwood's work is his fascination with the stage, its performing artists and artisans, as displayed in The Dresser, After the Lions, Another Time, Quartet, and his non-fiction book All the World's a Stage, a general history of theatre.
Harwood also had a strong interest in the Nazi period, especially the situation of individuals who either voluntarily collaborated with the Nazis or, alternatively, faced strong pressure to do so and had, in each case, to work out their own personal combination of resistance, deception and compromise. His work focusing on this period includes the films Operation Daybreak, The Statement, The Pianist, the play later adapted to film Taking Sides, the play Collaboration, and the play An English Tragedy.
Harwood also wrote the screenplay for the films The Browning Version with Albert Finney, Being Julia with Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons, and Roman Polanski's version of Oliver Twist with Ben Kingsley.
He won an Academy Award for the script of The Pianist, having already been nominated for The Dresser in 1983. Harwood received his third Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2007 for his adaptation of the memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, for which he also won a BAFTA and the Prix Jacques Prévert du Scénario in 2008, for Best Adaptation. In 2008 Harwood was also given the Humanitas Award in recognition of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Recognition

Harwood was President of the English PEN Club from 1989 to 1993, and of PEN International from 1993 to 1997. He was Chairman of the Royal Society of Literature from 2001 to 2004, and was president of the Royal Literary Fund from 2005. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1974, Knight of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996, and Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1999.
In 2003 he was appointed a member at the Department of Language and Literature of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was awarded a DLitt degree from Keele University in 2002, honoured with a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Krastyo Sarafov National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in 2007, made an Honorary Fellow of the Central School of Speech and Drama in 2007, and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Chichester in 2009. Harwood was knighted in the 2010 Birthday Honours.
National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview with Harwood in 2005–2007 for its An Oral History of Theatre Design collection held by the British Library. In 2004 the British Library also acquired the papers of Ronald Harwood, consisting of manuscripts and papers, correspondence, and press cuttings.
He was named Chairman of the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford in 2008. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the University of Chichester in 2009. In June 2013 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Aberdeen by the Duchess of Rothesay. He received the National Jewish Theatre Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.
In May 2017 an authorized biography of Harwood, Speak Well of Me by W. Sydney Robinson, was published by Oberon Books.

Personal life

He attended the Seapoint Boys' High School in that area of Cape Town. He moved to England in 1951. In 1959 he married Natasha Riehle, a descendant of Russian nobility. They had three children: Antony, Deborah, and the composer Alexandra Harwood.
The actor Sir Antony Sher was his first cousin once removed. Harwood was the brother of the South African dance critic Eve Borland.
Harwood died from natural causes at his home in Sussex on 8 September 2020, at age 85.

Stage plays

Screenplays

Books and published works

  • All the Same Shadows Cape
  • George Washington September Sir! Avon
  • The Guilt Merchants Cape
  • The Girl in Melanie Klein Secker & Warburg
  • Sir Donald Wolfit: His Life and Work in the Unfashionable Theatre Secker & Warburg
  • Articles of Faith Secker & Warburg
  • The Genoa Ferry Secker & Warburg
  • César and Augusta Secker & Warburg
  • One. Interior. Day. Adventures in the Film Trade, Secker & Warburg
  • New Stories 3: An Arts Council Anthology Hutchinson
  • The Dresser Grove Press
  • A Night at the Theatre, Methuen
  • The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold Amber Lane
  • After the Lions Amber Lane
  • All the World's a Stage, Secker & Warburg
  • The Ages of Gielgud, an Actor at Eighty, Hodder & Stoughton
  • Tramway Road Amber Lane
  • The Deliberate Death of a Polish Priest Amber Lane
  • Interpreters Amber Lane
  • Mandela, Boxtree
  • Dear Alec: Guinness at 75, Hodder & Stoughton
  • Another Time Amber Lane
  • Reflected Glory Faber
  • Home Weidenfeld & Nicolson
  • The Collected Plays of Ronald Harwood, Faber
  • The Faber Book of the Theatre Faber
  • Harwood Plays: Two , Faber
  • The Handyman Faber
  • Quartet/Equally Divided Faber
  • Mahler's Conversion Faber
  • The Pianist/Taking Sides Faber
  • An English Tragedy Faber
  • Ronald Harwood's Adaptations: From Other Works Into Films, Guerilla Books