Ronald Harwood

Harwood was born Ronald Horwitz in Cape Town, in what was then the Union of South Africa, the son of Isobel (née Pepper) and Isaac Horwitz.[1] After attending Sea Point High School,[2] 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.[3]

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 would later draw 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, he joined the 59 Theatre Company for a season at the Lyric Hammersmith during which time 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.[4][5]

In 1960, Harwood began a career as a writer and published his first novel, All the Same Shadows in 1961, the screenplay for Private Potter (1962) from his television drama, and the stage play, March Hares in 1964. Harwood continued at a prolific pace penning 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 (The Dresser).

One of the recurring themes in Harwood's work was his fascination with the stage, its performing artists and artisans, as displayed in The Dresser, After the Lions (about Sarah Bernhardt), Another Time (a semi-autobiographical piece about a gifted South African pianist), Quartet (about ageing opera singers), 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, who 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 (covering the assassination by the Czechoslovakian Resistance of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich), The Statement (a fictionalized account of the post-War life-on-the-run of French collaborator Paul Touvier), The Pianist (an adaptation of the autobiography of the Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman covering his survival during the Nazi occupation of Poland), the play later adapted to film Taking Sides (focused on the post-War "de-Nazification" investigation of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler), the play Collaboration (about the composer Richard Strauss and his partnership with the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig), and the play An English Tragedy (dealing with the British fascist John Amery).[6][7]

Harwood 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 Polanski'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 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 awarded the Humanitas Award in recognition of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

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 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1974, Knight (Chevalier) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996, and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) 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,[8] honoured with a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Krastyo Sarafov National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts (Sofia, Bulgaria) in 2007, made an Honorary Fellow of the Central School of Speech and Drama (London, England) in 2007, and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Chichester in 2009. Harwood was knighted in the 2010 Birthday Honours.[9]

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1173/02) with Harwood in 2005–2007 for its An Oral History of Theatre Design collection held by the British Library.[10] The British Library also acquired the papers of Ronald Harwood in 2004 consisting of manuscripts and papers, correspondence, and press cuttings.[11]

He was named chairman of the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford in 2008. In June 2013, he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Aberdeen by the Duchess of Rothesay.[12] 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.

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 (1938–2013), a descendant of Russian nobility. They had three children: Antony (born 1960), Deborah (born 1963), and Alexandra (born 1966).[13]

The actor Sir Antony Sher was his first cousin, once removed.[14] Harwood was the brother of South African dance critic Eve Borland.[15]

Harwood died from natural causes at his home in Sussex on 8 September 2020, at age 85.[16][17]

• List of Jews from Sub-Saharan Africa
• List of British Jews
• List of South Africans

• Who's Who in the Theatre 17th edition, Gale (1981) ISBN 0-8103-0235-7
• Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies, 4th edition, HarperCollins (2006) ISBN 0-00-716957-4
• Sydney Robinson, W., Speak Well of Me: the authorized biography of Ronald Harwood, London (2017)
• Theatre Record and its annual Indexes
• The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, Oxford (1996) ISBN 0-19-212271-1

• Ronald Harwood at IMDb
• Ronald Harwood at the Internet Broadway Database
• AUSTRALIA: a Baz Luhrmann film
• Sir Ronald Harwood: Screenwriting Lecture part of the BAFTA Screenwriters on Screenwriting series
• Portraits of Ronald Harwood at the National Portrait Gallery, London