Ronald Harwood Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Ronald Harwood, born Ronald Horwitz on 9 November 1934 in Cape Town, South Africa, grew up in a Jewish family whose roots traced to Central and Eastern Europe. He showed an early fixation on the theatre, reading plays and seeking out touring productions in Cape Town. At seventeen he moved to London, entering the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In an era when stage careers often hinged on class and name, he adopted the professional surname Harwood, a pragmatic change that signaled his determination to build a life in the British theatre.

Apprenticeship in the Theatre
After drama school he joined the company led by the formidable actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit. Harwood first performed small parts, then became Wolfit's dresser, the backstage attendant who keeps an actor's world in motion during touring seasons. The relentless travel, threadbare digs, and nightly transformations of an aging star offered him a masterclass in temperament, craft, and survival. Wolfit's company worked an old-fashioned repertory model, and Harwood absorbed the rituals, hierarchies, and hypocrisies of that world with a keen observer's eye. Those years seeded his lifelong fascination with the moral pressures placed on artists and the fragile communities that sustain them.

Playwriting and Major Themes
Leaving performance behind, Harwood turned to writing for the stage, the page, and later the screen. His breakthrough play, The Dresser, distilled his experience with Wolfit into a poignant portrait of loyalty, vanity, and endurance backstage during wartime. It became a transatlantic hit and fixed Harwood's name among leading playwrights. He continued to examine artists facing hard choices in morally compromised times: Taking Sides interrogates the postwar reckoning of conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler; The Handyman probes the lingering reach of wartime crimes; Collaboration explores the uneasy partnership between Richard Strauss and the writer Stefan Zweig; Quartet finds rue and humor among retired opera singers grasping for dignity. Throughout, he returned to questions that preoccupied him: How does art survive under pressure? What is complicity, and who gets to judge? How do memory and performance shape identity?

From Stage to Screen
Harwood's fluency in structure and character made him a sought-after screenwriter. He adapted his own The Dresser for film, directed by Peter Yates and anchored by Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, a work that earned multiple Academy Award nominations. His long collaboration with directors of distinctive sensibility broadened his range: with Roman Polanski he wrote The Pianist, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and later Oliver Twist; with Istvan Szabo he wrote Being Julia and adapted Taking Sides for the screen; with Julian Schnabel he adapted The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, winning critical acclaim and further awards recognition. He also returned to South African material with the screenplay for Cry, the Beloved Country, bringing the moral gravity of Alan Paton's novel to new audiences. Other notable projects include The Browning Version for Mike Figgis and The Statement, adapted from Brian Moore and directed by Norman Jewison. Even when translating others' books, his signature concerns remained visible: individual responsibility, the costs of survival, and the resilience of art.

Recognition and Influence
Harwood's career bridged the British stage tradition and international cinema. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in recognition of his contributions to drama, was knighted in 2010. Critics often noted the classical clarity of his dramaturgy: he favored lucid structures, moral argument, and the music of well-made scenes. His work is populated by artists and officials, secretaries and soldiers, people for whom choices are a matter not only of taste but of conscience. Collaborators such as Roman Polanski, Istvan Szabo, Julian Schnabel, Peter Yates, and actors including Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay were central to how his stories reached global audiences, while historical figures like Wilhelm Furtwangler, Richard Strauss, and Stefan Zweig served as prisms for the dilemmas he dramatized.

Personal Life and Final Years
Harwood made his home in Britain and built a family life alongside his writing. Those who knew him describe an exacting craftsman with wry humor and a deep affection for the theatre's working people, from dressers to stage managers. He maintained ties to organizations devoted to writers and freedom of expression, reflecting his belief that art requires both community and vigilance. He died on 8 September 2020 in England, aged eighty-five.

Legacy
Ronald Harwood leaves a body of work that connects backstage realities to the broader dramas of the twentieth century. By turning the intimate exchange between actor and dresser into a parable of loyalty, or the interrogation of a musician into a meditation on complicity, he made moral discourse dramatically gripping. He also demonstrated how a playwright's sensibility can thrive on screen without losing theatrical precision. Younger dramatists and screenwriters cite his elegance, his ethical seriousness, and his generosity with craft advice. His plays continue to be revived, his films continue to be taught, and his portraits of artists under pressure continue to resonate in an era that still tests the boundaries of courage and responsibility.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Ronald, under the main topics: Friendship - Writing - Movie - Work - Perseverance.