The Paper's reporter Cheng Xiaojun
On September 8, local time, screenwriter Ronald Harwood, who won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his film "The Pianist" directed by Roman Polanski, died of illness at his home in the United Kingdom at the age of 85.
Ronald Harwood won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Pianist
Ronald Harwood was born on November 9, 1934, to a Jewish family in Cape Town, South Africa, to Ronald Horwitz. At the age of 17, he chose to study in London, England, to realize his dream of becoming a stage actor. At the famous Royal Theatre School (RADA), his mentor advised him to change his surname, because the surname Horviz was Jewish at first, and in the British social environment at that time, it was not close enough for stage actors. So he chose Ronald Harwood as his stage name.
At the age of twenty, Ronald Harwood joined the troupe of the famous British stage actor Donald Wolfit, and in addition to acting, he also served as a close follower of the former for five years. Wolfe was an iconic figure in British theatre in the first half of the last century, arguably the most famous Shakespearean actor before the advent of Lawrence Oliver. However, in private, he is also known for his temperament and arrogance, and he can serve his people for many years, and Harwood can be said to have tasted all kinds of sweet and sour and bitter.
After leaving the Wolfey Theatre Company, Harwood gradually transformed from a stage actor to a writer and screenwriter, creating many plays and novels. In 1980, he started with his experience as a waiter for Donald Wolfey and wrote the play "The Dresser", which landed on the West End of London and the Broadway stage in the United States, and received excellent responses. Three years later, the stage play was remade into a film of the same name, and Harwood took on the role of producer in addition to adapting the script himself. In the end, the film received a total of four nominations at the 56th Academy Awards, including Harwood's nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and male lead Albert Finney won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival.
Poster of The Makeup Artist (1983).
In 2015, Anthony Hopkins and Ian McLean, two old drama bones, re-starred in the TV-movie version of "The Makeup Artist", which was also widely acclaimed. In this regard, In his later years, Harwood modestly said that he did not know why the show "Makeup Artist" had such a lasting charm, "Yes, it was my first successful work, and I was indeed very proud of it, but to be honest, I really did not expect it to be so popular with the public." 」 This play is about the relationship between people and people, about people's emotions, about people's hearts, not people's heads, and that's what I like about Makeup Artist."
Poster of The Makeup Artist (2015).
However, at that year's Oscars, Harwood ultimately failed to defeat James Brooks, the screenwriter of "Mother-Daughter Love", and lost his hand with the little golden man. It was not until nearly twenty years later, at the age of nearly seventy, that he finally won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his play for Roman Polanski's "The Pianist".
The Pianist is an adaptation of the Polish pianist Spielmann's autobiographical novel City of the Dead, which tells the story of the Jewish pianist's harrowing experiences during World War II. In fact, Polanski sought out Harwood for a reason — during World War II, the personal experiences of small people in the tide of history were one of the screenwriter's favorite themes. In addition to The Pianist, Harwood's films Operation Daybreak (1975), Count Down to War (1989), Taking Sides (2001), and The Statement (2003) are all about this theme.
Poster of "The Pianist"
After winning the Oscar for "The Pianist", Harwood also successfully entered the list of Hollywood's first-line screenwriters, making him usher in a peak of his creative career after he was more than seventy years old. He wrote "Being Julia" (2004), "Oliver Twist" (2005), "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (2007), "Love in the Time of Cholera" (2008), "Australia" (Australia, Films such as 2008, A Therapy (2012) and Quartet (2012) have mostly been acclaimed and acclaimed. And he himself was nominated for the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay again for "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", but eventually lost to the Coen brothers in "Old And Helpless".
Although he has participated in the creation of so many literary and artistic films, for Harwood, his heart has always been on the stage. "Making movies is for money," he said with a smile in an interview with the British "Guardian" in 2016, "This money is very profitable, this small profit is big, but writing stage plays is my favorite job, because it is about language, about the relationship between people and people." Long before "The Pianist" won the Oscars, Harwood had already been awarded the Order of the British Empire and Knighthood for his achievements in stage playwriting.
Editor-in-charge: Cheng Yu