Frederic Raphael

Raphael was born in Chicago,[1] to an American Jewish mother from Chicago, Irene Rose (née Mauser) and a British Jewish father, Cederic Michael Raphael, an employee of the Shell Oil Company who had been transferred to the United States from Shell's London office.[2][3] In 1938, when Raphael was seven, and to his surprise, the family migrated to England[1] and settled in Putney, London. He was educated at Copthorne Preparatory School, Charterhouse School, and St John's College, Cambridge.[4]

Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the movie Darling (1965), 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 have appeared 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.[5] The sequel, Fame and Fortune, which continues the story to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. 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 published several history books, collections of essays, and translations. He has also written biographies of W. Somerset Maugham and Lord Byron. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964.[6]

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. Raphael wrote a detailed account of his working with Kubrick, based on his own journals, but upon its publication the book was publicly criticised by several of the director's friends and family members, among them Christiane Kubrick,[7] Jan Harlan,[8] and Michael Herr,[9] for its unflattering portrayal of him. Referring to an article by Raphael about his book in The New Yorker, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise also professed criticism.[10][11]

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

He married Sylvia Betty Glatt on 17 January 1955, and they had three children. His daughter, Sarah Raphael, was an English artist known for her portraits. She died in 2001.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Frederic Raphael.

• Raphael film reference entry
• Frederic Raphael at IMDb
• Raphael's BFI entry
• Yahoo biography
• Plays by Raphael Archived 3 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine