Ronald Harwood
Ronald Harwood CBE ( born November 9, 1934 in Cape Town, South Africa ) is a British screenwriter, film producer and theater actor.
Life and work
Harwood was born as the child of Jewish immigrants Isaac Horwitz and Isobel Pepper in South Africa and moved at the age of 17 years to London to become a stage actor. After attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he was on the recommendation of Sir Donald Wolfit member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Between 1953 and 1958 personal assistant Wolfit, Harwood was able to acquire in this way a lot of personal knowledge. Also he wrote after the death Wolfits (1968 ) a biography entitled: Sir Donald Wolfit CBE: His Life and Work in the Unfashionable Theatre. His experiences with Wolfit and his ensemble he worked also in the stage play The dresser, under the title An odd couple with Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay was filmed in 1983 and to the Harwood also contributed the screenplay.
These career as a screenwriter, he had already embarked in 1962 and worked over the years on numerous films, which recorded international success.
Especially with issues that affect the Second World War, Harwood has often dealt. As he wrote in 2001 with Taking Sides the biopic of the life of Wilhelm Furtwangler, in István Szabó directed. For István Szabó he also wrote the screenplay for Being Julia. This film was released in 2004.
The most famous film Harwood was produced in 2002, however, the Holocaust drama The Pianist, which tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Adrien Brody embodies. Harwood even got the gold trophy for this work at the Academy Awards 2003. A drama again directed by Roman Polanski was the 2005 film adaptation directed Oliver Twist.
Another of his projects was the Mike Newell film Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez in 2007. Together with Baz Luhrmann Harwood further revised the script for the epic Australia, which premiered in November 2008.
His theater piece collaboration in 2009 had its German premiere of Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig cooperate in the opera The Silent Woman, which will come out in 1935 in Dresden. Strauss, president of the National Socialist Reich Chamber of Music, collaborated with the Nazis, but it shows in this " artistic " case, Courage, enforcing that the name of the Jewish branch is printed on the program notes.
Varia
His cousin, the actor Antony Sher is also drawn from South Africa to London.
Literary works and plays
Harwood has written over twenty stage plays, a series of novels and non-fiction books.
Filmography
Awards (selection)
- Three Oscar nominations, including awards to
- Three BAFTA nominations
- A Golden Globe nomination