19 Facts About Alan Sharp

Alan Sharp was a Scottish novelist and screenwriter.

Alan Sharp published two novels in the 1960s, and subsequently wrote the screenplays for about twenty films, mostly produced in the United States.

Alan Sharp left school at 14 to apprentice in the yards, the first of a long series of odd jobs.

Alan Sharp worked as assistant to a private detective, as an English teacher in Germany, construction laborer, dishwasher, night switchboard operator for a burglar alarm firm, packer for a carpet company, and had a role at IBM.

Alan Sharp then relocated to London with the intention of becoming a writer.

One of Alan Sharp's screenplays was broadcast on British television in 1963, and his play A Knight in Tarnished Armour, based on his time on the docks, was broadcast in 1965.

The third novel, which had the working title The Apple Pickers, was left incomplete when Alan Sharp emigrated to Hollywood and focused on screenwriting.

Alan Sharp married for a second time and had a relationship with the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, with whom he had a daughter, Ruth.

Alan Sharp lived for a number of years in New Zealand on Kawau Island, but moved back to Scotland in 2000.

In 1996, Peter Broughan announced that he and Alan Sharp would be making two further feature films together, Vain Glory about Christopher Marlowe and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; neither was made.

Nor was a film Alan Sharp wrote about Scottish poet Robert Burns.

Alan Sharp was one inspiration for Sometimes She'll Dance, by Brian Pendreigh, originally published as a short story in 2012 and used in a revised form as the concluding part of his critically acclaimed novel The Man in the Seventh Row and Related Stories of the Human Condition in 2020.

Alan Sharp was survived by his fourth wife, Harriet Alan Sharp, and a total of six children, two stepsons and 14 grandchildren, including professional wrestler Jack Perry.

Alan Sharp had a life and a lifestyle he enjoyed and that seemed to be enough.

Alan Sharp had a huge talent, but sometimes seemed to lack ambition, or was reluctant to commit himself or seemed afflicted with doubt about his own abilities, dismissing his work as 'pastiche'.

Alan Sharp's screenplays are marked by a narrative complexity and situations gravid with implication and doom.

Much is made of pre-Star Wars '70s Hollywood as a kind of celluloid golden age, and Alan Sharp was there in the thick of it, working with the very best, generating the sort of track record few British screenwriters are likely to match.

Alan Sharp had an unbroken forty year career writing features and television.

Alan Sharp herself died before these could be collected in New Zealand, but Sharp's papers are now held by Archive Services at the University of Dundee.