| Frederic Raphael | |
| Honorific Suffix: | FRSL |
| Birth Name: | Frederic Michael Raphael |
| Birth Date: | 1931 8, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Alma Mater: | St John's College, Cambridge |
| Years Active: | 1956–present |
| Awards: | Academy Award, BAFTA, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature |
| Spouse: | Sylvia Betty Glatt (m.1955–present) |
| Children: | 3, including Sarah Raphael |
Frederic Michael Raphael FRSL (born 14 August 1931) is an American-born British novelist, biographer, journalist and Oscar-winning screenwriter, known for writing the screenplays for Darling, Far from the Madding Crowd, Two for the Road, and Stanley Kubrick's last film Eyes Wide Shut. Raphael rose to prominence in the early 1960s with the publication of several acclaimed novels, but most notably with the release of the John Schlesinger film Darling, starring Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde, a romantic drama set in Swinging London, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1966. Two years later he was nominated again in the same category, this time for his work on Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road, starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Since the death of screenwriter D. M. Marshman Jr. in 2015, he is the earliest surviving recipient of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and the sole surviving recipient of the now retired BAFTA category of Best British Screenplay.
In addition to his work in film and television, he has written over 20 novels, and a number of non-fiction books, including biographies of Lord Byron, W. Somerset Maugham and Flavius Josephus, as well as a memoir of his time working with Stanley Kubrick, entitled Eyes Wide Open.[1]
Raphael was born in Chicago, to an American Jewish mother from Chicago, Irene Rose (née Mauser) and a British Jewish father, Cedric Michael Raphael, an employee of the Shell Oil Company who had been transferred to the United States from Shell's London office.[2] [3] In 1938, when Raphael was seven, and to his surprise, the family migrated to England[4] and settled in Putney, London. He was educated at Copthorne Preparatory School, Charterhouse School, and St John's College, Cambridge.[5]
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 have appeared 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.[6] The sequel, Fame and Fortune, which continues the story to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. 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 W. Somerset Maugham and Lord Byron. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964.[7]
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,[8] Jan Harlan,[9] and Michael Herr,[10] for its alleged 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.[11] [12] That year, Penguin Books published a new translation of Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story, the basis for Eyes Wide Shut, featuring a new introduction by Raphael.
He married Sylvia Betty Glatt, known as 'Beetle', on 17 January 1955, and they had three children and nine grandchildren. His daughter, Sarah Raphael, was an English artist known for her portraits. She died in 2001.