David Hare

Sir David Rippon Hare (born 5 June 1947) is an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre and film director. 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. 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). 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. Other notable projects on stage include A Map of the World, Pravda (starring Anthony Hopkins at the National Theatre in London), Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War, The Vertical Hour, and his latest play Straight Line Crazy starring Ralph Fiennes. 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. 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. Early life David Hare was born and raised – first in a flat, then in a semi-detached house – in St Leonards-on-Sea, Hastings, Sussex, 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). While at Cambridge he was the Hiring Manager on the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club Committee in 1968.