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44 Ronald Harwood speaks of the theater as his “natural habitat,” as is only fitting for a man who has written three dozen noteworthy plays, nonfiction books, and histories of the stage. His name is synonymous with quality theater in England, and his life’s work has led to him being made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE), among many other high recognitions . At the same time, dating back forty-five years to his early brushes with film—particularly his first major credit on Alexander Mackendrick’s film of Richard Hughes’s novel A High Wind in Jamaica (1965)—he has been nearly as prolific and accomplished at his sideline of writing motion pictures , becoming over the years a stealth candidate for the master adapter of the profession. Sometimes the films are tricky adaptations of his own plays, other times they are trickier adaptations of beloved novels by world-famous authors as diverse as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alan Paton, Charles Dickens, Somerset Maugham, and Gabriel García Márquez. As this list suggests, Harwood, a Londoner by way of South Africa and a onetime president of International PEN, has been the most worldly of screenwriters, writing acclaimed films that are presented in foreign languages and for directors as diverse as the Finnish-born Caspar Wrede, the Hungarian Istvan Szabo, and the displaced Parisian Roman Polanski. Harwood has been nominated for an Oscar three times, and won, in 2002, for his script of The Pianist, directed by Polanski, based on the memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman about his struggle for survival in wartime Warsaw. Harwood has been peaking as a screenwriter for the last ten years, seeming to specialize in bravura projects that would daunt, or at least slow down, a lesser mortal. The year 2007 was especially remarkable, INTERVIEW BY PATRICK MCGILLIGAN RONALD HARWOOD IMAGINATION McGilligan_Ch04 8/7/09 11:37 AM Page 44 RONALD HARWOOD 45 with his adaptations of the Gabriel García Márquez novel Love in the Time of Cholera for the English director Mike Newell, and the JeanDominique Bauby memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for the American Julian Schnabel. (The script for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly may have lost the Oscar to the Coen brothers in Hollywood, but Harwood’s adaptation won the top prize in its category at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards.) Two more disparate or difficult adaptations it would be hard to imagine, but a Ronald Harwood script has become a guarantee of excellence. • • • Growing up in South Africa as you did, I gather you fell in love with theater. But were you following films at all? British and Australian only, or Hollywood as well? With any idea that films too had scripts and writers. . . ? I saw British and Hollywood films. I don’t think I ever saw an Australian film. (Were there any?) The first film I saw, aged six, was The Mark of Zorro (1940) with Tyrone Power. When I was a little older we used to go to the cinema (in those days called the “bioscope” by South Africans) on Saturday mornings and see serials and comedy shorts. It never occurred to me that films had scripts. I think the first time I had any notion of a screenplay was when I saw Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and Henry V (1944), because I realized that Shakespeare had to be adapted for the screen. Alan Dent was credited as “script advisor” and I knew his name because he was a well-known London theater critic. But I don’t think I showed any interest in other screenwriters until I saw The Third Man in 1949 or 1950, and that was because I knew and was greatly influenced by the novels of Graham Greene. I was impressed that so famous a writer also wrote for the screen. What is the first thing you wrote (article, poem, script, or whatever) for which you were paid actual money? A novel, called in England All the Same Shadows and in the USA, George Washington September, Sir! When you were serving as “the dresser,” did you know instinctively that one day you were going to write it all up? And were you taking notes or relying on memory? No, not at all. I had no idea I would be a writer when I was Sir Donald Wolfit’s dresser. My burning ambition was to be an actor.And I never make McGilligan_Ch04 8/7/09 11:37 AM...

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