Robert Oxton Bolt was an English playwright and a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter, known for writing the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Man for All Seasons, the latter two of which won him the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
16 Facts About Robert Bolt
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Robert Bolt was born in Sale, Cheshire, to Methodist parents; his father owned a small furniture shop.
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Robert Bolt then served as an Army officer in West Africa until 1947, when he returned to the University of Manchester and spent three years completing his honours degree in History.
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Robert Bolt won praise for A Man for All Seasons, his first iteration of this theme, but he developed it in his existential script for Lawrence of Arabia.
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Robert Bolt later regretted his actions and did not speak to Spiegel again after the film was completed.
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Robert Bolt's final produced script was Political Animal, later made into the TV movie Without Warning: The James Brady Story, about the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan and the struggles of his press secretary James Brady to recover from a near-fatal gunshot injury he received in the process.
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Robert Bolt was initially reluctant to make the film, but after meeting Brady he felt he could relate to Brady's struggles with a head injury, and many of his own experiences recovering from his stroke found their way into the script.
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Robert Bolt was married four times, twice to British actress Sarah Miles.
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Robert Bolt was married to Miles from 1967 until 1976; Bolt had his fourth child, Thomas, with Miles.
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Robert Bolt suffered a heart attack and a stroke that left him paralysed in 1979.
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Robert Bolt died aged 70 in 1995, in Petersfield, Hampshire, England, following a long illness.
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Robert Bolt was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1972.
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Robert Bolt wrote several plays for BBC Radio in the 1950s, as well as several unproduced plays.
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Robert Bolt won two Oscars, two BAFTA Awards and won or was nominated for several others.
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Robert Bolt worked on the early drafts of the script for Gandhi, but his script was considered unsatisfactory and he was replaced by John Briley.
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Robert Bolt had several unrealised projects, including a TV miniseries of Gore Vidal's novel Burr, an adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time for Norman Lear and Blest Souls, a biopic about Michael Collins with Michael Cimino.