Celebrity Biographies
Ronald harwood
He excelled at adapting books and writing films about musicians, while he is considered one of the great British playwrights of the late 20th century. Sir Ronald Harwood, Oscar winner for the libretto of “The Pianist”, died at the age of 85 on September 8, 2020. This was confirmed by his agent, Judy Dash, who specified that he had been of natural causes.
Born in Cape Town (South Africa), on November 9, 1934, when he was 17 he moved to London, where after taking classes at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he joined the Shakespeare Company, Sir Donald Wolfit’s theater company. .
Starting in the 60s, Ronald Harwood has dedicated himself to writing plays. In 1961 he published his first novel, “All the Same Shadows”, and made his debut as a screenwriter with Private Potter , from 1962. In 1980 he triumphed on the London West End stage with “The Dresser”, which also swept Broadway for one year. after. The text, where Ronald Harwood is inspired by his experience in the world of theater, gave rise to the film The Actor’s Shadow , with Albert Finney , whose script was personally commissioned by the author himself.
He preferred to dedicate himself to the tables. “I make movies for the money,” Ronald Harwood recounted in an interview in 2016, “It’s a lot of money, that’s for sure. And they overpay us, of course they overpay us, that’s why I’m not complaining, but still writing theater is what I like the most because it revolves around language, relationships and language”. Despite everything, he did a lot of work for the big screen, as he was also responsible for The Browning version , Knowing Julia , Australia and Love in the Time of Cholera , a failed adaptation of the excellent novel by Gabriel García Márquez . For The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, one of his best works, was based on the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby, where he collected his experiences after being paralyzed.
For The Pianist , for which he won the Academy Award, he took as a basis the book by Wladyslaw Szpilman , a Jewish musician who recounted his experiences during the Holocaust. In addition to repeating with the director of that one, Roman Polanski , in Oliver Twist , Ronald Harwood returned to pick up the world of music in The Quartet (Quartet) , a dramatic comedy about opera singers who age in a retirement home for musicians, which marked the directorial debut of Dustin Hoffman in 2012.
Married to Natasha, who was with him until his death in 2013, Ronald Harwood had three children, Antony, Deborah and Alexandra. In 2010 the British government awarded him a knighthood for his services to the theatre.