Frederic Raphael

Early life

Raphael was born to a Jewish family, in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Irene Rose (née Mauser) and Cedric Michael Raphael, an employee of the Shell Oil Co. With his parents, he emigrated to Putney, England, in 1938.

Raphael was educated at Copthorne Preparatory School, Charterhouse School and St John's College, Cambridge.

Career

Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling, 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 appear 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. Fame and Fortune, which continues the story to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, television channels having refused to commission the sequel themselves. 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 Somerset Maugham and Lord Byron. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964.

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 made criticisms of Kubrick, and upon its publication the book was publicly criticised by several of the director's friends and family members, among them Christiane Kubrick, Jan Harlan, Michael Herr, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise.

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

Personal life

He married Sylvia Betty Glatt on 17 January 1955, and their children are Paul Simon, a film producer, Sarah Natasha (1960–2001), who was a painter, and Stephen Matthew Joshua, a screenwriter.

Fiction

Nonfiction

Screenplays (partial list)