David Hare (playwright)

Sir David Rippon Hare (born 5 June 1947) is an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director.

While at Cambridge, he was the Hiring Manager on the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club Committee in 1968.

Hare worked with the Portable Theatre Company from 1968 to 1971.

His first play, Slag, was produced in 1970, the same year in which he married his first wife, Margaret Matheson; the couple had three children and divorced in 1980.

He was Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre, London, from 1970 to 1971, and in 1973 became resident dramatist at the Nottingham Playhouse.

He co-founded the Joint Stock Theatre Company with David Aukin and Max Stafford-Clark in 1975.

In the West End, he had his greatest success with the plays Plenty (1978), which he adapted into a 1985 film starring Meryl Streep, Racing Demon (1990), Skylight (1997), and Amy's View (1998).

Hare's play Plenty was produced at the National Theatre in 1978.

Aside from films, he has also written teleplays such as, for the BBC, Licking Hitler (1978), and, for Thames Television, Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983).

The play is set at the Unesco conference on poverty held in Bombay in 1978.

The play, a satire on the mid-1980s newspaper industry, in particular the Australian media and press baron Rupert Murdoch, stars Anthony Hopkins in a role that earned him the Laurence Olivier Award.

The four plays ran on Broadway in 1982–83, 1996, 1998 and 1999 respectively, earning Hare three Tony Award nominations for Best Play for the first three and two Laurence Olivier Awards for Best New Play.

His other notable projects on stage include A Map of the World, Pravda (starring Anthony Hopkins at the Royal National Theatre in London), Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War, The Vertical Hour, and his latest play Straight Line Crazy starring Ralph Fiennes.

Hare founded a film company called Greenpoint Films in 1982, and among screenplays he has written are Plenty, Wetherby, Strapless, and Paris by Night.

In 1983, his play A Map of the World was produced at the Royal National Theatre.

The production starred Bill Nighy, Diana Quick, and Ronald Hines.

Hare has been associate director of the National Theatre since 1984.

David Hare was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, Hastings, Sussex, and was raised – first in a flat, then in a semi-detached house – in Bexhill-on-Sea, the son of Agnes Cockburn (née Gilmour) and Clifford Theodore Rippon Hare, a passenger ship's purser in the Merchant Navy.

His father's elder brother was the cricketer Steriker Hare.

The Hare family claimed descent from the Earls of Bristol.

Hare was educated at Lancing College, an independent school in Sussex, and at Jesus College, Cambridge (MA (Cantab.), English Literature).

Hare became the associate director of the National Theatre in 1984, and has since seen many of his plays produced, including his trilogy about major British institutions: Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, and The Absence of War.

He has also directed many other plays aside from his own works, notable examples being The Pleasure Principle by Snoo Wilson, Weapons of Happiness by Howard Brenton, and King Lear by William Shakespeare for the National Theatre.

He has also been awarded several critics' awards, such as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and he received the Golden Bear in 1985.

It transferred to The Public Theatre in 1985, starring Alfre Woodard, Elizabeth McGovern, and Zeljko Ivanek.

In a mixed review, The New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich wrote: "The play is in part about conflicting points of view – about how reactionaries and leftists look at geopolitics, how journalists and novelists look at events and how the West and the Third World look at each other."

In 1985, Hare wrote Pravda with Howard Brenton, its title referring to the Russian Communist party newspaper Pravda.

In 1990, Hare wrote Racing Demon; part of a trio of plays about British institutions, it focuses on the Church of England, and tackles issues such as gay ordination, and the role of evangelism in inner-city communities.

The play debuted at the National Theatre and received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play.

The play transferred to the Broadway stage at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1995.

The production starred Paul Giamatti, Denis O'Hare, and Kathleen Chalfant.

The play was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play.

In 1995, Hare's translation of Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht was produced in London.

In 1996, Hare wrote Skylight, a play about a woman who receives an unexpected visit from her former lover whose wife has recently died.

Michael Gambon and Lia Williams starred in the original production, which received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play.

The following year, the production transferred to the Broadway stage, where it was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play.

Best known for his stage work, Hare has also enjoyed great success with films, receiving two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing The Hours' in 2002, based on the novel written by Michael Cunningham, and The Reader' in 2008, based on the novel of the same name written by Bernhard Schlink.

He wrote screenplays for films including the Stephen Daldry dramas The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008) and BBC's Page Eight (2011) and Netflix's Collateral (2018).

In addition to his two Academy Award nominations, Hare has received three Golden Globe Award nominations, three Tony Award nominations and has won a BAFTA Award, a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and two Laurence Olivier Awards.

Hare is also the author of a collection of lectures on the arts and politics called Obedience, Struggle, and Revolt (2005).