Sir Peter Levin Shaffer (born 15 May 1926) is an English playwright and screenwriter of numerous award-winning plays, several of which have been filmed.

Early life[link]

Shaffer was born to a Jewish family in Blackpool, the son of Reka (née Fredman) and Jack Shaffer, an estate agent.^[1][2] He is the twin brother of fellow playwright, Anthony Shaffer.

He was educated at St Paul's School (London) and subsequently he gained a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study history. Shaffer was a Bevin Boy coal miner during WW2 and took a number of jobs including bookstore clerk, and assistant at the New York Public Library, before discovering his dramatic talents.

Theatrical career[link]

Shaffer's first play, The Salt Land (1954), was presented on the BBC. Encouraged by this success, Shaffer continued to write and established his reputation as a playwright in 1958 with the production of Five Finger Exercise which opened in London under the direction of John Gielgud and won the Evening Standard Drama Award. When Five Finger Exercise moved to New York in 1959, it was equally well received and landed Shaffer the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.

Shaffer's next piece was a double bill, The Private Ear/The Public Eye, two plays each containing three characters and concerning aspects of love. They were presented in May 1962 at the Globe Theatre, and both starred Maggie Smith.

In 1963, The National Theatre was established, and virtually all of Shaffer's subsequent work was done in its service.

Shaffer's canon contains a unique mix of philosophical dramas and satirical comedies. The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) presents the tragic conquest of Peru by the Spanish, while Black Comedy (1965) takes a humorous look at the antics of a group of characters feeling their way around a pitch black room — although the stage is actually flooded with light.

Equus (1973) won Shaffer the 1975 Tony Award for Best Play as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. A journey into the mind of a 17-year-old stableboy who had plunged a spike into the eyes of six horses, Equus ran for over 1000 performances on Broadway. It was revived by Massachusetts' Berkshire Theatre Festival in the summers of 2005 and 2007, by director Thea Sharrock at London's Gielgud Theater in February 2007, and on Broadway (in the Sharrock staging) in September 2008. The latter production, which ran in New York until February 2009, required the stableboy to appear naked; its star, Daniel Radcliffe, was still associated with the Harry Potter films intended for general audiences, and this led to mild controversy.^[3]

Shaffer followed this success with Amadeus (1979) which won the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics Award for the London production. This tells the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and court composer Antonio Salieri who, overcome with jealousy at hearing the "voice of God" coming from an "obscene child", sets out to destroy his rival. When the show moved to Broadway it won the 1981 Tony Award for Best Play and, like Equus, ran for more than 1000 performances.^{[citation needed]}

Screen adaptations[link]

Several of Shaffer's plays have been adapted to film, including Five Finger Exercise (1962), The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), The Public Eye (1962), from which he adapted the 1972 film Follow Me! (1972), Equus (1977), and Amadeus (1984), which won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture.

Shaffer received two Academy Award–nominations for adapting his plays Equus and Amadeus for the big screen. For writing the screenplay for Equus, he was nominated for the 1977 Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar but the award went to Alvin Sargent, who wrote the screenplay for Julia. For writing the screenplay for Amadeus, Shaffer received both the 1984 Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the 1984 Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.

Awards[link]

Shaffer received the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater in 1992. Two years later he was appointed Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford University.

In 1993, he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Letters) by the University of Bath.^[4]

Honours[link]

He was named Knight Bachelor in the 2001 New Year's Honours.

Selected works[link]

• The Salt Land (1954)
• Balance Of Terror (1957)
• The Prodigal Father (1957)
• Five Finger Exercise (1958)
• The Private Ear and The Public Eye (1962)
• The Establishment (1963)
• The Merry Roosters Panto (1963)
• The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), a theatre piece on Atahualpa, the last emperor of the Tahuantinsuyu.
• Black Comedy (1965)
• The White Liars (1967)
• Shrivings (1970)
• Equus (1973)
• Amadeus (1979)
• Black Mischief (1983)
• Yonadab (1985)
• Lettice and Lovage (1987)

• Whom Do I Have The Honour Of Addressing? (1990)
• The Gift of the Gorgon (1992)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Peter Shaffer

• Peter Shaffer at the Internet Movie Database
• Peter Shaffer at the Internet Broadway Database
• Transcript and clips of an interview by Mike Wood for the William Inge Center for the Arts.

Paul Scofield
Scofield in 1974.
Born	(1922-01-21)21 January 1922 Birmingham, England, UK
Died	19 March 2008(2008-03-19) (aged 86) Sussex, England, UK
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1940–2006[1]
Spouse	Joy Parker (1943-2008; his death)

David Paul Scofield, CH, CBE (21 January 1922 – 19 March 2008), better known as Paul Scofield, was an English actor of stage and screen. Noted for his distinctive voice and delivery, Scofield received an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for his performance as Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, a reprise of the role he played in the stage version at the West End and on Broadway for which he received a Tony Award.

Early life[link]

Scofield was born in Birmingham, England, the son of Mary and Edward Harry Scofield.^[2] When Scofield was a few weeks old, his family moved to Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, where his father served as the headmaster at the Hurstpierpoint Church of England School.^[3] At the age of 12 he began attending the Varndean Secondary School in Brighton,^[4] where he took various roles in school plays.^[5]

Scofield began his stage career in 1940 with a debut performance in Desire Under the Elms at the Westminster Theatre, and was soon being compared to Laurence Olivier. He played at the Old Rep in Birmingham. From there he went to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, where he starred in Walter Nugent Monck's 1947 revival of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.^[6]

Career[link]

Scofield was noteworthy for his striking presence and distinctive voice, and for the clarity and unmannered intensity of his delivery. His versatility at the height of his career is exemplified by his starring roles in theatrical productions as diverse as the musical Expresso Bongo (1958) and Peter Brook's celebrated production of King Lear (1962).

In his memoir Threads of Time, Peter Brook wrote about Scofield's versatility: "The door at the back of the set opened, and a small man entered. He was wearing a black suit, steel-rimmed glasses, and holding a suitcase. For a moment we wondered who this stranger was and why he was wandering onto our stage. Then we realized that it was Paul, transformed. His tall body had shrunk; he had become insignificant. The new character now possessed him entirely."^[7]

In a career mainly devoted to the classical theatre, Scofield starred in many Shakespeare plays and played the title role in Ben Jonson's Volpone in Peter Hall's production for the Royal National Theatre (1977). Highlights of his career in modern theatre include the roles of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (1960), Charles Dyer in Dyer's play Staircase, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, the definitive Laurie in John Osborne's A Hotel in Amsterdam (1968), and Antonio Salieri in the original stage production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus (1979).

He was subsequently the voice of the Dragon in another play by Robert Bolt, a children's drama The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew. Expresso Bongo, Staircase and Amadeus were filmed with other actors, but Scofield starred in the screen versions of A Man for All Seasons (1966) and King Lear (1971).

Other major screen roles include the obsessed Nazi Colonel in The Train (1964), Strether in a 1977 TV adaptation of Henry James's novel The Ambassadors, Tobias in A Delicate Balance (1973), Professor Moroi in the film of János Nyíri's If Winter Comes (1980), for BBC Television, Mark Van Doren in Robert Redford's film Quiz Show (1994), and Thomas Danforth in Nicholas Hytner's film adaptation (1996) of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

According to the DVD extras documentary for the movie The Shooting Party (1985), on the very first shot of the very first day of filming, all of the male lead actors, including Paul Scofield who was playing Sir Randolph Nettleby, were to come into shot on a horse-drawn shooting-break driven by the well-known film horse-master George Mossman. However as they turned the first corner, the break-plank that Mossman was standing on broke in two and Mossman was hurled forward and down falling between the sets of wheels, taking the reins with him. He was struck by a horse's hoof and concussed. The horses then shied and broke into a gallop. Rupert Frazer admitted that he was the first to jump off, landing safely, but bruised. Now out of control, the horses turned to the right when confronted by a stone wall causing the shooting-break to roll completely, catapulting the actors into a pile of scaffolding that had been stacked next to the wall. Robert Hardy stood up and realised to his amazement that he was unhurt. He looked across to see Edward Fox stand up, "turn completely green and collapse in a heap". He had broken 5 ribs and his shoulder-blade. He then noticed that Paul Scofield was lying very still on the ground "and I saw that his shin-bone was sticking out through his trousers". As the film takes place in October due to the partridge-shooting season, the filmmakers had to make a choice as to either delay filming for a year, or re-cast. Fortunately James Mason was just finishing filming Doctor Fischer of Geneva for the BBC and the schedule was changed to allow him to take over the part of Sir Randolph Nettleby six weeks later.^[8]

Scofield was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1956 New Year Honours.^[9] He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for A Man for All Seasons and was nominated as Best Supporting Actor for Quiz Show. Theatrical accolades include a 1962 Tony Award for A Man for All Seasons.

In 1969, Scofield became the sixth performer to win the Triple Crown of Acting, winning an Emmy Award for Outstanding Single Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for Male of the Species.

He was also one of only eight actors to win both the Tony and the Oscar for the same role on stage and film. He was appointed a Companion of Honour (CH) in the 2001 New Year Honours.^[10] In 2002 he was awarded the honorary degree of D. Litt by the University of Oxford.^[11]

In 2004, a poll of actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, including Ian McKellen, Donald Sinden, Janet Suzman, Ian Richardson, Antony Sher and Corin Redgrave, acclaimed his Lear as the greatest Shakespearean performance ever.^[12] Scofield appeared in many radio dramas for BBC Radio 4, including in later years plays by Peter Tinniswood: On the Train to Chemnitz (2001) and Anton in Eastbourne (2002). The latter was Tinniswood's last work and was written especially for Scofield, an admirer of Anton Chekhov. He was awarded the 2002 Sam Wanamaker Prize.

Personal life[link]

Scofield married actress Joy Parker in 1943.^[6] The couple had two children; Martin (born 1945) (a Senior Lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Kent)^[4] and Sarah (born 1951).

He declined the honour of a knighthood on three occasions,^[4][13] but was appointed CBE in 1956 and became a Companion of Honour in 2001.

Scofield died from leukemia on 19 March 2008 at the age of 86 at a hospital near his home in Sussex, England.^[14] His memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey on 19 March 2009.

Filmography[link]

(For a slightly different, more exhaustive list, go here ^[15])

Television[link]

(for a different and more exhaustive list, go here here ^[16])

Discography[link]

Paul Scofield led the cast in several dramas issued by Caedmon Records:

• King Lear, directed by Howard Sackler (Text edited by G.B. Harrison), with Pamela Brown (Goneril), Rachel Roberts (Regan), Ann Bell (Cordelia); Wallace Eaton (France), John Rogers (Burgundy), Trevor Martin (Cornwall), Michael Aldridge (Albany), Andrew Keir (Kent), Cyril Cusack (Gloucester), Robert Stephens (Edgar), John Stride (Edmund), Ronnie Stevens (Fool); Arthur Hewlett (Curan, Doctor), Ronald Ibbs (Gentleman, Knight), Willoughby Goddard (Oswald). Eight sides, SRS 233 (first published 1965).
• Hamlet, directed by Howard Sackler, (Unabridged), with Diana Wynyard (Queen), Roland Culver (Claudius), Donald Houston (Laertes), Zena Walker (Ophelia), Wilfrid Lawson. Eight sides, SRS 232 (first published 1963).
• A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Howard Sackler, with Barbara Jefford, Joy Parker, John Stride, etc. Six sides, SRS 208 (first published 1964).
• T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion, with Flora Robson, Sybil Thorndike, Alan Webb. Six sides, TRS 308.
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, with Ralph Richardson as Scooge. Scofield only narrated. (Caedmon),

Also:

• King Lear, with Harriet Walter (Goneril), Sara Kestelman (Regan), Emilia Fox (Cordelia), Alec McCowen (Gloucester), Kenneth Branagh (Fool), David Burke, Richard A. McCabe, Toby Stephens, etc. Released 2002 to coincide with Scofield's 80th birthday. (Naxos Audiobooks, 3CD set).
• Virgil, The Aeneid, Paul Scofield (narrator), Jill Balcon and Toby Stephens (readers). (Naxos Audiobook CD).
• T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Four Quartets (BBC Radiobooks CD).
• Sandor Marai, Embers (Penguin Audiobooks) - Narrator
• With David Suchet and Ron Moody, Scofield led the cast of a radio dramatization of the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, which are available as CD issues. (Tynedale Entertainment) - Narrator
• Scofield recorded abridged readings of Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Bleak House (Blackstone Audiobooks).
• Façade (Sitwell-Walton), performed by Paul Scofield and Peggy Ashcroft, with London Sinfonietta conducted by William Walton. (Argo Records, 1972)
• Don Quixote: The Musical, with Roy Hudd as Sancho Panza. Based on Purcell and D'Urfey's The Comical History of Don Quixote. Later released on CD.(Musica Oscura, 1994)

(For a more exhaustive list, go here ^[17])

References[link]

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Paul Scofield

• Paul Scofield at the Internet Movie Database
• Paul Scofield at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Paul Scofield at the Internet Broadway Database
• BBC News Interview-Paul Scofield, A Man For All Seasons
• Paul Scofield at Find a Grave

• Obituaries:
  • The Guardian, 20 March 2008
  • The Independent, 21 March 2008
  • The Times, 21 March 2008
  • The Daily Telegraph, 22 March 2008

John Guare
Guare at the 2009 premiere of PoliWood
Born	(1938-02-05) February 5, 1938 (age 74) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Playwright
Nationality	American
Period	1964–present
Notable work(s)	The House of Blue Leaves; Six Degrees of Separation

John Guare (pronounced gwâr; born February 5, 1938) is an American playwright. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body. His style, which mixes comic invention with an acute sense of the failure of human relations and aspirations, is at once cruel and deeply compassionate.

In the foreword to a collection of Guare's plays, film director Louis Malle writes:

Guare practices a humor that is synonymous with lucidity, exploding genre and clichés, taking us to the core of human suffering: the awareness of corruption in our own bodies, death circling in. We try to fight it all by creating various mythologies, and it is Guare's peculiar aptitude for exposing these grandiose lies of ours that makes his work so magical.^{[citation needed]}

Early life[link]

Guare was born in New York City and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. He was raised a Roman Catholic, but is apparently now a lapsed Catholic.^[1] He was educated at Georgetown University, (BA, 1960), where in 1958 he contributed a song to an original musical revue entitled The Natives Are Restless and presented by the Mask and Bauble Dramatic Society. The song humorously attributed the success of many famous people to the syllable “O” in their names. Under the direction of Donn B. Murphy, his play The Toadstool Boy, about a country singer's quest for fame, won first place in the District of Columbia Recreation Department's One-Act-Play competition.

In 1960, the Mask and Bauble presented The Thirties Girl, a musical for which Guare did the book, much of the music and the lyrics, again under Murphy's tutelage. Set in Hollywood's turbulent 1920's, it dealt with the dethronement of a reigning diva by a fresh-faced starlet. (Management of identity and celebrity, and the quest for fame, the focus of these early efforts, are recurring themes in the body of Guare's work. He subsequently imported the Hollywod ingenue's song, I'm Here With Bells On into his first full-length Off-Broadway play, The House of Blue Leaves, which received an Obie Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, and subsequently won Guare a Tony Award in its 1986 Broadway revival.)

Guare and Swoosie Kurtz at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.

Guare went on to the Yale School of Drama, (MFA, 1963).

Career[link]

Guare's early plays, mostly comic one-acts exhibiting a flair for the absurd, include To Wally Pantoni, We Leave a Credenza (1964), Muzeeka (1968), and Cop-Out (1968). The House of Blue Leaves (1971), a domestic drama by turns wildly comic and despairingly desperate, moved Guare into the front ranks of American dramatists. Chaucer in Rome, a sequel to The House of Blue Leaves, received its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in July 1999 and later enjoyed a production in New York by Lincoln Center Theater.

Later plays include Marco Polo Sings a Solo, Bosoms and Neglect, Moon Over Miami, Six Degrees of Separation, and Four Baboons Adoring the Sun. Lake Hollywood and A Few Stout Individuals (2002) both received their world premieres at Signature Theatre. Six Degrees of Separation (1990), an intricately plotted comedy of manners about an African-American confidence man who poses as the son of film star Sidney Poitier, has been the most highly praised and widely produced of Guare's full-length plays. It was made into a film in 1993.

Guare’s cycle of plays on nineteenth-century America, Gardenia, Lydie Breeze and Women and Water, has been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington D.C., London and Australia. A Few Stout Individuals returns to nineteenth century America, with a cast that includes Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain, soprano Adelina Patti and the Emperor and Empress of Japan. These historic dramas investigate the violence at the root of American identity and the failure of utopian aspirations.

Guare has also been involved with musical theatre. His libretto with Mel Shapiro for the musical Two Gentlemen of Verona was a success when it premiered in 1971 and was revived in 2005 at the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park. It won the two men the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical. He wrote the songs for Landscape of the Body. Guare wrote narration for '"Psyche,"' a tone poem by César Franck, which premiered at Avery Fisher Hall in October 1997, conducted by Kurt Masur with the New York Philharmonic. In 1999, he revised the book of the Cole Porter musical comedy, Kiss Me, Kate for its Broadway revival. He also wrote the book for the Broadway musical Sweet Smell of Success (musical).

Guare wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle's film Atlantic City (1980), for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

He was a founding member in 1965 of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut and Resident Playwright at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976. He is a council member of the Dramatists Guild, co-editor of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, co-produces the New Plays Reading Room Series at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts and teaches in the Playwriting department at the Yale School of Drama.

Works[link]

All dramas for the stage unless otherwise noted.

• (1971) The House of Blue Leaves
• (1971) Two Gentlemen of Verona
• (1974) Rich and Famous
• (1977) Landscape of the Body
• (1977) Marco Polo Sings a Solo
• (1979) Bosoms and Neglect
• (1980) Atlantic City (screenplay)
• (1982) Lydie Breeze
• (1982) Gardenia
• (1986) The Race to Urga
• (1990) Six Degrees of Separation
• (1990) Women and Water
• (1992) Four Baboons Adoring the Sun
• (1999) Lake Hollywood
• (2001) Chaucer in Rome
• (2002) A Few Stout Individuals
• (2010) A Free Man of Color

Awards and honors[link]

• Muzeeka won an Obie in 1968.
• The House of Blue Leaves won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play in 1971 and four Tony Awards for its 1986 revival at Lincoln Center Theater.
• Two Gentlemen of Verona won both the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical in 1972. Guare also received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics.
• Six Degrees of Separation won an Obie Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and London’s Olivier Award for Best Play; it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
• Mr. Guare received the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his plays The House of Blue Leaves, Rich and Famous, Marco Polo Sings a Solo, Landscape of the Body and Bosoms and Neglect.
• In 1989, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters elected him a member.
• In 1993 he was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame.
• In 1996 he received the New York State Governor’s Arts Award.
• Signature Theatre honored him with a season 1998 - 1999.
• In 1999 he was honored at the William Inge Festival.
• In 2003 he won The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama.

References[link]

1. ^ [1]

External links[link]

• Anne Cattaneo (Winter 1992). "John Guare, The Art of Theater No. 9". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1993/the-art-of-theater-no-9-john-guare. 
• John Guare at the Internet Movie Database
• Biography at theatredatabase.com
• John Guare with poster for his Caffe Cino production
• John Guare Papers at Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.