Sir David Hare

19 October 10

BAFTA/Jay Brooks

David Hare has a reputation for elegant and highly intelligent screenplays which inspire extraordinary performances from actors.


He first came to prominence as a playwright in the ‘70s after his debut play Slag (1970) won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. Since then, his work has enjoyed sell-out runs at the National Theatre and many of his plays have been presented on Broadway.


Among Hare’s television work is the acclaimed teleplay Licking Hitler (1978), a companion piece to his stage play Plenty (1978), both of which explore the effects of the Second World War on the lives of women who’d served in the conflict. The drama, which Hare also directed, won the BAFTA for Best Single Play.


Moving into feature film, Hare wrote and directed Wetherby (1985), an award-winning drama about the mysterious death of an enigmatic young man. He also wrote and directed Paris By Night (1988), in which a politician makes a deadly choice when threatened with a scandal, and adapted Josephine Hart’s novel Damage (1992), about an MP’s passionate affair with his son’s fiancée.


His most recent work includes two adaptations for Stephen Daldry. The Hours (2002) explored the effect of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway on three generations of women, whilst The Reader (2008) saw a law student in post-WWII Germany re-encountering his former lover as she defends herself in a war-crime trial. Hare was BAFTA- and Oscar-nominated for both screenplays.


Hare has written a new film, Page Eight, which he will direct.

More from Sir David Hare

• Watch Sir David Hare's Screenwriting Lecture
• Find out more about his favourite script

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