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Frederic Raphael

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Frederic Raphael
Born (1931-08-14) 14 August 1931 (age 93)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
OccupationWriter

Frederic Michael Raphael (born 14 August 1931) is an American-born, British screenwriter, biographer, nonfiction writer, novelist and journalist.

Early life

Raphael was born to a Jewish family,[1] in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Irene Rose (née Mauser) and Cedric Michael Raphael, an employee of the Shell Oil Co.[2]. He moved to Putney, London, England, in 1938 aged 7, when his parents emigrated to the United Kingdom.

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

Frederic Raphael was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to an American Jewish mother from Chicago, Irene Rose (nee Mauser) and a British Jewish father, Cederic Michael Raphael, who was an employee of the Shell Oil Company who had been transferred to the United States from Shell's London office. The family returned to England and settled in a London suburb in 1937.

Career

Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the movie Darling (1965), 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.[3] 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 wrote a detailed account of his working with Kubrick, based on his own journals, but upon its publication the book was publicly criticised by several of the director's friends and family members, among them Christiane Kubrick,[4] Jan Harlan,[5] and Michael Herr[6][self-published source], for its unflattering portrayal of him.

Referring to an article by Raphael about his book in the New Yorker, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise also professed criticism.[7][8]

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 they had three children.

Works

Fiction

Non-fiction

  • Somerset Maugham and his World (1976)
  • The Poems of Catullus (with Kenneth McLeish) (1979)
  • The List of Books: A Library of Over 3000 Works (with Kenneth McLeish) Harmony Books, New York City, 1981. ISBN 0-517-54017-7.
  • The Necessity of Anti-Semitism (1998)
  • Popper: Historicism and Its Poverty 1998
  • Eyes Wide Open (1999)
  • Personal Terms (2001)
  • The Benefit of Doubt: Essays (2003)
  • A Spoilt Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (2003)
  • Rough Copy: Personal Terms 2 (2004)
  • Cuts and Bruises: Personal Terms 3 (2006)
  • Some Talk of Alexander: A Journey Through Space and Time in the Greek World (2006)
  • Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature (2007) (Illustrated by Barry Moser)
  • Ifs and Buts (journals) (2011)
  • How Stanley Kubrick Met His Waterloo (2011)[9]
  • A Jew Among Romans: The Life and Legacy of Flavius Josephus (2013)
  • Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (2013)
  • Going Up, Autobiography, Cambridge and After (2015)
  • Anti-Semitism (2015)

Screenplays (partial list)

References

  1. ^ Erens, Patricia (August 1988). The Jew in American Cinema. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-20493-6.
  2. ^ "Frederic Michael Raphael Biography (1931–)". Retrieved 13 September 2014.
  3. ^ Dust jacket notes to The Glittering Prizes (London: Allen Lane, 1976) ISBN 0-7139-1028-3
  4. ^ "Christiane Kubrick's Website". Archived from the original on 31 March 2009. Retrieved 13 September 2014.
  5. ^ "Those Close to Kubrick – IGN". IGN. Retrieved 13 September 2014.
  6. ^ "The Kubrick FAQ Part 3". Retrieved 13 September 2014.
  7. ^ https://variety.com/1999/voices/columns/kubrick-memoir-shocks-spielberg-1117503222/
  8. ^ Roger Ebert. "Cruise opens up about working with Kubrick – Interviews – Roger Ebert". Retrieved 13 September 2014.
  9. ^ Raphael, Frederic (13 August 2011). "How Stanley Kubrick Met His Waterloo". The Wall Street Journal.
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