Christopher Hampton

Christopher James Hampton, CBE, FRSL (born 26 January 1946) is a British playwright, screenwriter, translator 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.

Early life and theatrical debut
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 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 in Surrey, Hampton attended the independent boarding school Lancing College near the village of Lancing in West Sussex at the age of 13, where 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 where OUDS performed his play When Did You Last See My Mother?, about adolescent homosexuality, reflecting 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 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.

Stage plays
From 1968 to 1970, he 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 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 the eventual production transferred to London's West End and ran for three years. It reached Broadway in 1971. His agent told him after this success that: “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, was first performed in 1973.

A sojourn in Hollywood led to an unproduced film adaptation of Marlowe's play Edward II and the original script for Carrington. More significantly it provided material for Tales from Hollywood (1980). It is a partly fictionalised account (the lead character's real life equivalent, Ödön von Horváth, died in Paris in 1938) of exiled European writers living in the United States during the second world war. The play is partly about the different philosophies of Horwath and the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (who did live in the United States in the 1940s). Hampton told The Guardian critic Michael Billington in 2007: I lean towards the liberal writer, Horvath, rather than the revolutionary Brecht. I suppose I'm working out some internal conflict". It was commissioned by the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles who first performed it in 1982. The play has been adapted for television in versions for British and Polish television.

Later works
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's translation into English of Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay's Austrian musical Rebecca, based on Daphne du Maurier's book, was supposed to premiere on Broadway in 2012; however, the future of this production is uncertain as of January 2013. The scheduled production became mired in scandal when "several investors were revealed to be concoctions of a rainmaking middleman."

Plays

 * 1964 – When Did You Last See My Mother?
 * 1967 – Total Eclipse
 * 1969 – The Philanthropist
 * 1973 – Savages
 * 1975 – Treats
 * 1984 – Tales From Hollywood
 * 1991 – White Chameleon
 * 1994 – Alice's Adventures Under Ground
 * 2002 – The Talking Cure
 * 2012 – Appomattox

Musicals (Book and lyrics)

 * 1993 – Sunset Boulevard with Don Black (Book & Lyrics), for Andrew Lloyd Webber
 * 2001 & 2004 – Dracula, The Musical with Don Black (Book & Lyrics), for Frank Wildhorn
 * 2012 – Rebecca (Book & Lyrics, translated from German)
 * 2013 – Stephen Ward the Musical with Don Black (Book & Lyrics), for Andrew Lloyd Webber

Adaptations

 * 1977 – Tales from the Vienna Woods, Ödön von Horváth
 * 1982 – The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. from the novella by George Steiner
 * 1983 – Tartuffe, Molière
 * 1985 – Les Liaisons Dangereuses from the novel by Choderlos de Laclos for the Royal Shakespeare Company
 * 1993 – Sunset Boulevard for Andrew Lloyd Webber
 * 2001 & 2004 – Dracula, The Musical for Frank Wildhorn
 * 2006 – Embers from the novel by Sándor Márai
 * 2009 – The Age of the Fish (in German Jugend ohne Gott) from the novel by Ödön von Horváth for the Theater in der Josefstadt

Filmography

 * 1973 – A Doll's House (adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play, directed by Patrick Garland)
 * 1977 – Able's Will (screenwriter; directed by Stephen Frears) for the BBC
 * 1979 – Tales from the Vienna Woods (screenwriter; directed by Maximilian Schell)
 * 1981 – The History Man (adaptation of the Malcolm Bradbury novel for the BBC
 * 1983 – Beyond the Limit (screenwriter)
 * 1984 – The Honorary Consul (adaptation of the Graham Greene novel)
 * 1986 – The Wolf at the Door (screenwriter)
 * 1986 – Hotel du Lac (adaptation of the novel by Anita Brookner)
 * 1986 – The Good Father (screenwriter) based on a novel by Peter Prince
 * 1986 – Arriving Tuesday (producer)
 * 1988 – Dangerous Liaisons (play author/screenwriter/ co-producer) directed by Stephen Frears)
 * 1989 – Tales from Hollywood (adaptation of his play for the BBC)
 * 1989 – The Ginger Tree (adaptation of the Oswald Wynd novel for the BBC)
 * 1995 – Carrington (screenwriter/director)
 * 1995 – Total Eclipse (play author/ screenwriter/ actor: The Judge) directed by Agnieszka Holland)
 * 1996 – Mary Reilly (screenwriter) based on the Valerie Martin novel about Dr. Jekyll's housemaid, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Julia Roberts and John Malkovich
 * 1996 – The Secret Agent (adaptor/ director, based on the Joseph Conrad novel)
 * 2002 – The Quiet American (adaptation of the Graham Greene novel)
 * 2003 – Imagining Argentina (screenwriter/ director)
 * 2007 – Atonement (adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel)
 * 2009 – Chéri (screenwriter)
 * 2009 – Sunset Boulevard (book for the musical, based on the Billy Wilder film)
 * 2011 – A Dangerous Method (play author/screenwriter) based on Hampton's The Talking Cure, adapted from the John Kerr non-fiction book A Most Dangerous Method. Directed by David Cronenberg.
 * 2012 – Ali and Nino (screenwriter) adapted from Kurban Said's novel Ali and Nino. Announced as screenwriter on 9 January 2012.
 * 2013 - The Thirteenth Tale for the BBC
 * 2013 - Adoration adapted from Doris Lessing's novella The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels

Translations

 * The Seagull
 * Uncle Vanya
 * Hedda Gabler
 * Don Juan by Molière
 * 1973 – A Doll's House
 * 1996 – Art by Yasmina Reza
 * 1998 – Enemy of the People
 * 2000 – Conversations After a Burial by Yasmina Reza
 * 2001 – Life x 3 by Yasmina Reza
 * 2008 – God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza
 * 2010 – Rebecca (musical) by Michael Kunze
 * 2014 – The Father by Florian Zeller
 * 2015 – The Mother by Florian Zeller
 * 2016 – The Truth (fr) by Florian Zeller
 * 2017 – The Lie by Florian Zeller
 * 2018 – The Height of the Storm by Florian Zeller
 * 2019 – The Son by Florian Zeller

Librettos

 * 2005 – Waiting for the Barbarians, music by Philip Glass
 * 2007 – Appomattox, music by Philip Glass
 * 2014 – The Trial, music by Philip Glass