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Christopher Hampton

 
Writer: Christopher Hampton
 
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Actors
  • Born: Jan 26, 1946 in Fayal, Azores
  • Occupation: Writer, Director
  • Active: '80s-2000s
  • Major Genres: Drama
  • Career Highlights: Dangerous Liaisons, Carrington, The Wolf at the Door
  • First Major Screen Credit: A Doll's House (1973)

Biography

One of Great Britain's most esteemed contemporary playwrights, Chris Hampton is best known in film for his Oscar-winning screenplays for Dangerous Liasons (1988), which he adapted from his own play, and his Academy Award nominated script for Atonement (2007), adapted from Ian McEwan's acclaimed novel. Hampton was born to British parents in the Azores. He was an 18-year-old student at Oxford when he had his first play produced. He earned his reputation for excellence while working as the resident dramatist at the Royal Court in London between 1968 and 1970. While there, he proved himself equally adept at adapting classic literature into plays as well as writing his own. His stage adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses brought him international acclaim. The young playwright's first screenplay was an adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1973). Hampton would not write another screenplay until he co-wrote Geschicten aus dern Weiner Wald/Tales From the Vienna Wood with Maximillian Schell (1979). In 1986, Hampton tried his hand at directing with the made-for-TV movie Hotel du Lac. Back in theater, Hampton earned acclaim for the libretto for Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation of Billy Wilder's classic film Sunset Boulevard (1950). ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
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Quotes By: Christopher Hampton
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Quotes:

"I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die."

"I think there's something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It's humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed."

"A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate"

"To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?"

"I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence."

"I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth."

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Wikipedia: Christopher Hampton
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Christopher Hampton
Born Christopher James Hampton
January 26, 1946 (1946-01-26) (age 63)
Fayal, Azores, Portugal
Spouse(s) Laura d Holesch' (1971-)

Christopher James Hampton CBE (born January 26, 1946) is an Academy Award-winning British playwright, screen writer and film director. He is best known for his play based on the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses and the film version Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and also more recently for writing the nominated screenplay for the film adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement.

Contents

Personal life

Hampton was born in Faial, Azores, to British parents Dorothy Patience (née Herrington) and Bernard Patrick Hampton, a marine telecommunications engineer for Cable & Wireless.[1][2] His father's job which led the family to subsequently settle in Aden and Alexandria in Egypt and later Hong Kong and Zanzibar. The Suez Crisis in 1956 necessitated that the family flee under cover of darkness, leaving their possessions behind.

After a prep school at Reigate, Hampton went to the independent boarding school Lancing College at the age of 13, where he won house colours for boxing and distinguished himself as a sergeant in the CCF. Fellow dramatist David Hare was a school contemporary.

In 1964 he went to New College, Oxford, as Sacher Scholar, to study German and French and graduated with a starred First Class Degree in 1968.[3]

Career

Hampton became involved in the theatre while at Oxford University where OUDS performed his play When Did You Last See My Mother, about adolescent homosexuality, reflecting his own experiences at Lancing.[1] Hampton sent the work to the play agent Peggy Ramsay, who interested William Gaskill in it.[1] The play was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and that production soon transferred to the Comedy Theatre, resulting in Hampton, in 1966, becoming the youngest writer to have a play performed in the West End in the modern era.[1] From 1968-70 he worked as the Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre, and also as the company's literary manager.[1]

Hampton won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1988 for the screen adaptation of his play Dangerous Liaisons. He was nominated again in 2007 for adapting Ian McEwan's novel Atonement.

Hampton forthcoming project is the translation into English of Michael Kunze & Sylvester Levay's Austrian musical Rebecca based on Daphne du Maurier's book which is scheduled to premiere in 2009 in Canada, and then move to Broadway in 2010.

Plays

  • 1964 - When Did You Last See My Mother?
  • 1967 - Total Eclipse
  • 1969 - The Philanthropist
  • 1974 - Savages
  • 1975 - Treats
  • 1984 - Tales From Hollywood
  • 1991 - White Chameleon
  • 2002 - The Talking Cure

Musicals (Book & Lyrics)

Adaptations

Filmography

Translations

Librettos

References

  1. ^ a b c d e John O'Mahony "Worlds of his own", The Guardian, 21 April 2001. Retrieved on 9 August 2008.
  2. ^ Christopher Hampton Biography (1946-)
  3. ^ a b Michael Coveney Hampton "A talent to adapt", The Guardian, 4 March 2006. Retrieved on 9 August 2008.

Bibliography

  • Massimo Verzella, “Embers di Christopher Hampton e la traduzione della malinconia”, Paragrafo, II (2006), pp. 69-82

External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Christopher Hampton

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

Copyrights:

Writer. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Christopher Hampton".  Read more

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