John Collee

John Gerald Collee (born 1955) is a Scottish/Australian doctor, novelist and screenwriter whose films - co-written with their respective directors - have three times been nominated for Oscars: Master and Commander (Nominated for Best Film 2003), Happy Feet (Won Best Animation, 2006), and Tanna (2015) (nominated for Best Foreign Language Feature). His many other films, written or co-written, include Creation (2013), Hotel Mumbai (2018) and the upcoming Lee (2023 film). His novels are "Kingsleys Touch" A Paper Mask and "The Rig" published by Viking/Penguin. His TV Adaptation of Boy Swallows Universe will stream on Netflix, Jan 2024. Background Collee was born in 1955 to Isobel and J. Gerald, the latter who was a professor of microbiology at the University of Edinburgh. Collee grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland and in India. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and began practising medicine in Cambridge, Bath, and Bristol. In his third year of practice, he wrote the medical thriller Kingsley's Touch, which was published in 1984. Collee subsequently worked in emergency medicine at home and abroad in Gabon, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka. His second novel titled A Paper Mask was published in 1987. Rights to the novel were acquired for a film adaptation, and Collee wrote the screenplay for director Christopher Morahan and Granada, who released the film Paper Mask in 1990. Around the time that his third novel The Rig was published, in 1991, Collee became a columnist for The Observer and wrote articles about travel, science and medicine, weekly for the next six years. While escorting medical supplies to Azerbaijan in the former Soviet Union, Collee met his wife Deborah Snow - Moscow-based correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The following year, and mid-way through writing a book about Soviet medicine called The Kingdom of the Blind, Collee accepted a medical post in the Solomon Islands. The couple had their first child, Lauren, on the islands. then both worked in London for a short time before moving to Sydney, Australia where Collee joined forces with Australian directors Peter Weir and George Miller. With Weir, Collee wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and with Miller he wrote the Oscar-winning Happy Feet. He wrote an early (uncredited) draft of The Legend of Tarzan (2016) for Warner Bros. with Guillermo del Toro slated to direct.