Sir Ronald Harwood was a South African-born British author, playwright, and screenwriter, best known for his plays for the British stage as well as the screenplays for The Dresser and The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
22 Facts About Ronald Harwood
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Ronald Harwood was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
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Ronald Harwood changed his surname from Horwitz to Harwood after an English master told him it was too foreign and too Jewish for a stage actor.
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From 1953 to 1958, Ronald Harwood was Sir Donald's personal dresser.
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In 1960, Ronald Harwood began a career as a writer and published his first novel, All the Same Shadows in 1961, the screenplay for Private Potter from his television drama, and the stage play, March Hares in 1964.
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Ronald Harwood continued at a prolific pace penning more than 21 stage plays, and 10 books.
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Ronald Harwood 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.
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One of the recurring themes in Ronald Harwood's work was his fascination with the stage, its performing artists and artisans, as displayed in The Dresser, After the Lions, Another Time, Quartet, and his non-fiction book All the World's a Stage, a general history of theatre.
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Ronald Harwood 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.
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Ronald Harwood wrote the screenplay for the films The Browning Version with Albert Finney, Being Julia with Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons, and Roman Polanski's version of Oliver Twist with Ben Kingsley.
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Ronald Harwood won an Academy Award for the script of The Pianist, having already been nominated for The Dresser in 1983.
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Ronald 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 won a BAFTA and the Prix Jacques Prevert du Scenario in 2008, for Best Adaptation.
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In 2008, Ronald Harwood was awarded the Humanitas Award in recognition of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
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Ronald Harwood was president of the English PEN Club from 1989 to 1993, and of PEN International from 1993 to 1997.
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Ronald Harwood was chairman of the Royal Society of Literature from 2001 to 2004, and was president of the Royal Literary Fund since 2005.
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Ronald Harwood was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1974, Knight of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996, and Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1999.
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Ronald Harwood was awarded a DLitt degree from Keele University in 2002, honoured with a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Krastyo Sarafov National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in 2007, made an Honorary Fellow of the Central School of Speech and Drama in 2007, and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Chichester in 2009.
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Ronald Harwood was named chairman of the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford in 2008.
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Ronald Harwood received the National Jewish Theatre Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.
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Ronald Harwood attended the Seapoint Boys' High School in that area of Cape Town.
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Ronald Harwood was the brother of South African dance critic Eve Borland.
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Ronald Harwood died from natural causes at his home in Sussex on 8 September 2020, at age 85.