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Roger Lewis (biographer)
Roger Lewis (born 26 February 1960) is a Welsh academic, biographer and journalist. He is best known for his biographies, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, and Erotic Vagrancy, about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Lewis was born in Caerphilly, Glamorgan in 1960. He was raised in Bedwas, Monmouthshire, and educated at Bassaleg School in Newport. He then attended the University of St Andrews, graduating MA, then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained the MLitt degree, both with first class honours. He became a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1984.
Lewis has contributed literary journalism to the Daily Express, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. He has written biographies of Peter Sellers (1994), Charles Hawtrey (2001), Anthony Burgess (2003), and Laurence Olivier (2007). His book on Sellers was dramatized by HBO as The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.
In the introduction to his Sellers biography, Lewis admits Norman Wisdom was his first "movie love". Wisdom was displaced in the young Lewis's affections one Saturday afternoon when he chanced upon a Peter Sellers double bill on television. Lewis was full of cold and had been left at home by his parents.
"Wrapped in my mother's Glenurquart tartan travelling rug, eating custard creams and drinking Ribena through a straw, I settled, in a bored sort of way, to watch a double bill on the only channel not killing time with sports commentaries."
The double bill - 'Peter Sellers Holiday Double: Two Way Stretch followed by Wrong Arm of the Law' - was broadcast on BBC2 on Saturday, 26 May 1973. Lewis was aged 13 at the time. Seeing these films sparked a lifelong love of Sellers, in particular his work in The Goons.
Seasonal Suicide Notes (2009) chronicles five years of the author's life. It was followed up by a second volume of "dyspeptic musings", What am I Doing Here? My Years as Me, in 2012.
Erotic Vagrancy, his massive joint biography of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, took him 13 years to complete, and was published to generally positive reviews in October 2023. In a talk to The Oldie Literary Lunch in January 2024, Lewis said he pitched the book to his publisher as "Roland Barthes meets The Wolf Man".
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Roger Lewis (biographer)
Roger Lewis (born 26 February 1960) is a Welsh academic, biographer and journalist. He is best known for his biographies, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, and Erotic Vagrancy, about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Lewis was born in Caerphilly, Glamorgan in 1960. He was raised in Bedwas, Monmouthshire, and educated at Bassaleg School in Newport. He then attended the University of St Andrews, graduating MA, then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained the MLitt degree, both with first class honours. He became a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1984.
Lewis has contributed literary journalism to the Daily Express, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. He has written biographies of Peter Sellers (1994), Charles Hawtrey (2001), Anthony Burgess (2003), and Laurence Olivier (2007). His book on Sellers was dramatized by HBO as The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.
In the introduction to his Sellers biography, Lewis admits Norman Wisdom was his first "movie love". Wisdom was displaced in the young Lewis's affections one Saturday afternoon when he chanced upon a Peter Sellers double bill on television. Lewis was full of cold and had been left at home by his parents.
"Wrapped in my mother's Glenurquart tartan travelling rug, eating custard creams and drinking Ribena through a straw, I settled, in a bored sort of way, to watch a double bill on the only channel not killing time with sports commentaries."
The double bill - 'Peter Sellers Holiday Double: Two Way Stretch followed by Wrong Arm of the Law' - was broadcast on BBC2 on Saturday, 26 May 1973. Lewis was aged 13 at the time. Seeing these films sparked a lifelong love of Sellers, in particular his work in The Goons.
Seasonal Suicide Notes (2009) chronicles five years of the author's life. It was followed up by a second volume of "dyspeptic musings", What am I Doing Here? My Years as Me, in 2012.
Erotic Vagrancy, his massive joint biography of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, took him 13 years to complete, and was published to generally positive reviews in October 2023. In a talk to The Oldie Literary Lunch in January 2024, Lewis said he pitched the book to his publisher as "Roland Barthes meets The Wolf Man".