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Christopher Hampton
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Christopher Hampton
Sir Christopher James Hampton CBE FRSL (born 26 January 1946) is a British playwright, screenwriter, and translator. He is best known for his play Les Liaisons Dangereuses based on the novel of the same name and the film adaptation. He has thrice received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay: for Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Atonement (2007) and The Father (2020); winning for the former and latter.
Hampton is also known for his work in the theatre including Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and The Philanthropist. He also translated the plays The Seagull (2008), God of Carnage (2009), The Father (2016), and The Height of the Storm (2019). He also wrote, with Don Black, the book and lyrics for the musical Sunset Boulevard (1994), for which they received Tony Awards for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score.
Hampton was born in Faial, Azores, to British parents Dorothy Patience (née Herrington) and Bernard Patrick Hampton, a marine telecommunications engineer for Cable & Wireless. His father's job led the family to settle in Aden, Yemen, and Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt, and later in Hong Kong and Zanzibar. During the Suez Crisis in 1956, the family had to flee Egypt under cover of darkness, leaving their possessions behind.
After a prep school at Reigate in Surrey, Hampton attended the independent boarding school Lancing College near the village of Lancing in West Sussex at the age of 13. There he won house colours for boxing and distinguished himself as a sergeant in the Combined Cadet Force (CCF). Among his contemporaries at Lancing was David Hare, later also a dramatist; poet Harry Guest was a teacher.
From 1964, Hampton read German and French at New College, Oxford, as a Sacher Scholar. He graduated with a starred First Class Degree in 1968.
Hampton became involved in the theatre while at Oxford University. The Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) performed his original play When Did You Last See My Mother?, about adolescent homosexuality. He drew from his own experiences at Lancing. Hampton sent the work to the play agent Peggy Ramsay, who interested William Gaskill in it. The play was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and soon transferred to the Comedy Theatre; in 1966, Hampton was the youngest writer in the modern era to have a play performed in the West End. Hampton's work on screenplays for the cinema also began around this time. He adapted this play for Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes, but a film version was never made.
From 1968 to 1970, Hampton worked as the Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre, and also as the company's literary manager. He continued to write plays: Total Eclipse, about the French poets and lovers Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, was first performed in 1967 and at the Royal Court in 1968, but it was not well received at the time. The Philanthropist (1970) is set in an English university town and was influenced by Molière's The Misanthrope. The Royal Court delayed a staging for two years because of an uncertainty over its prospects, but their production was one of the Royal Court's more successful works up to that point. The production transferred to the Mayfair Theatre in London's West End and ran for nearly four years, winning the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Comedy. It reached Broadway in New York City in 1971.
His agent told him after this success: "You've got a choice: you can write the same play over and over for the next 30 years" or, alternatively, "you can decide to do something completely different every time". He told her that he was writing a play about the "extermination of the Brazilian Indians in the 1960s". Savages, set during the period of the military government and derived from an article "Genocide in Brazil" by Norman Lewis, was first performed in 1973. His first produced film adaptation, of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1973), was directed by Patrick Garland, and stars Anthony Hopkins and Claire Bloom.
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Christopher Hampton
Sir Christopher James Hampton CBE FRSL (born 26 January 1946) is a British playwright, screenwriter, and translator. He is best known for his play Les Liaisons Dangereuses based on the novel of the same name and the film adaptation. He has thrice received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay: for Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Atonement (2007) and The Father (2020); winning for the former and latter.
Hampton is also known for his work in the theatre including Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and The Philanthropist. He also translated the plays The Seagull (2008), God of Carnage (2009), The Father (2016), and The Height of the Storm (2019). He also wrote, with Don Black, the book and lyrics for the musical Sunset Boulevard (1994), for which they received Tony Awards for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score.
Hampton was born in Faial, Azores, to British parents Dorothy Patience (née Herrington) and Bernard Patrick Hampton, a marine telecommunications engineer for Cable & Wireless. His father's job led the family to settle in Aden, Yemen, and Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt, and later in Hong Kong and Zanzibar. During the Suez Crisis in 1956, the family had to flee Egypt under cover of darkness, leaving their possessions behind.
After a prep school at Reigate in Surrey, Hampton attended the independent boarding school Lancing College near the village of Lancing in West Sussex at the age of 13. There he won house colours for boxing and distinguished himself as a sergeant in the Combined Cadet Force (CCF). Among his contemporaries at Lancing was David Hare, later also a dramatist; poet Harry Guest was a teacher.
From 1964, Hampton read German and French at New College, Oxford, as a Sacher Scholar. He graduated with a starred First Class Degree in 1968.
Hampton became involved in the theatre while at Oxford University. The Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) performed his original play When Did You Last See My Mother?, about adolescent homosexuality. He drew from his own experiences at Lancing. Hampton sent the work to the play agent Peggy Ramsay, who interested William Gaskill in it. The play was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and soon transferred to the Comedy Theatre; in 1966, Hampton was the youngest writer in the modern era to have a play performed in the West End. Hampton's work on screenplays for the cinema also began around this time. He adapted this play for Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes, but a film version was never made.
From 1968 to 1970, Hampton worked as the Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre, and also as the company's literary manager. He continued to write plays: Total Eclipse, about the French poets and lovers Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, was first performed in 1967 and at the Royal Court in 1968, but it was not well received at the time. The Philanthropist (1970) is set in an English university town and was influenced by Molière's The Misanthrope. The Royal Court delayed a staging for two years because of an uncertainty over its prospects, but their production was one of the Royal Court's more successful works up to that point. The production transferred to the Mayfair Theatre in London's West End and ran for nearly four years, winning the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Comedy. It reached Broadway in New York City in 1971.
His agent told him after this success: "You've got a choice: you can write the same play over and over for the next 30 years" or, alternatively, "you can decide to do something completely different every time". He told her that he was writing a play about the "extermination of the Brazilian Indians in the 1960s". Savages, set during the period of the military government and derived from an article "Genocide in Brazil" by Norman Lewis, was first performed in 1973. His first produced film adaptation, of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1973), was directed by Patrick Garland, and stars Anthony Hopkins and Claire Bloom.
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