Ronald Harwood

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Ronald Harwood CBE (born November 9, 1934 in Cape Town, South Africa) is a playwright and writer.

He moved to London in 1951 to pursue a career in the theatre. After attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he joined the Shakespeare Company of Sir Donald Wolfit, one of the last great actor-managers in Great Britain. From 1953 to 1958, Harwood was Sir Donald's personal dresser. He would later draw on this experience when writing his play, The Dresser, and write a biography, Sir Donald Wolfit CBE: His life and work in the Unfashionable Theatre.

In 1960, he started a new career as a writer and was quite prolific, penning plays, novels and non-fiction books. He also often worked as a screenwriter, but he seldom wrote original material directly for the screen, rather acting as an adapter, sometimes of his own work (notably The Dresser).

One of the recurring themes in Harwood's work is his fascination for the stage, its artists and artisans as displayed in the aforementioned The Dresser, his plays, After the Lions (about Sarah Bernhardt), Another Time (about a gifted piano player), Quartet (about aging opera singers) and his non-fiction book All the World's a Stage, a general history of theatre. Harwood also has a strong interest in World War II, as shown by the films Operation Daybreak, The Statement, The Pianist, and his play turned to film Taking Sides. Based on true stories, the two last films feature musicians as their main characters.

He also wrote the screenplay for the films, The Browning Version (1994) with Albert Finney, Being Julia (2004) with Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons, and Roman Polański's version of Oliver Twist (2005) with Ben Kingsley.

He won an Academy Award for the script of The Pianist, having already been nominated for The Dresser previously.

Harwood was president of the English PEN Club from 1989 to 1993, and of International PEN from 1993 to 1997. He was Chairman of the Royal Society of Literature (2001 to 2004) and is President of the Royal Literary Fund (2005). He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1974, Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters (1996) and Commander of the British Empire in 1999.

His nephew is the actor Sir Antony Sher.

In 2003 he was elected a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.

Ronald Harwood

See also