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Richard Curtis - Academy Fellow in 2007

21 December 2007
Richard Curtis receives the Fellowship of the AcademyGary Moyes | BAFTA

Richard Curtis accepted the Academy’s highest honour – the Fellowship – at the British Academy Television Awards in 2007. Watch as friends and colleagues pay tribute to “an absolute national treasure”.

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Stars from the world of film, television and beyond paid special tribute to the life and work of Richard Curtis at the British Academy Television Awards in 2007.

Curtis took the stage to receive the highest accolade the Academy can bestow, the Fellowship, presented for outstanding achievement through a body of work.

In a superb career Richard Curtis has written some of Britain’s best loved film and television comedies including Mr Bean, Blackadder, The Vicar of Dibley, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary. He has also been instrumental in founding the charity Comic Relief and the international campaign Make Poverty History. As Bono says in his personal tribute here, his endeavours have literally saved thousands of lives.

Love has always been as major theme running through Curtis’s many screenplays and his friends and colleagues believe it is love that ultimately drives his work and vision for the world.

And so, even though comedian Dawn French believes him to be "the most splendid, bandy, utter knobhead I have ever met", Robbie Williams perhaps sums Curtis up best as “an absolute national treasure”.