Christopher Hampton

Sir Christopher James Hampton CBE FRSL (born 26 January 1946) is a British playwright, screenwriter, translator and film director. He is best known for his play based on the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses and the film version Dangerous Liaisons (1988), which received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was nominated in the same category for his film adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2007).

Hampton was born in Faial, Azores, to British parents Dorothy Patience (née Herrington) and Bernard Patrick Hampton, a marine telecommunications engineer for Cable & Wireless. His father's job led the family to settle in Aden and Alexandria in Egypt, and later in Hong Kong and Zanzibar. During the Suez Crisis in 1956, the family had to flee Egypt under cover of darkness, leaving their possessions behind.

After a prep school at Reigate in Surrey, Hampton attended the independent boarding school Lancing College near the village of Lancing in West Sussex at the age of 13. There he won house colours for boxing and distinguished himself as a sergeant in the Combined Cadet Force (CCF). Among his contemporaries at Lancing was David Hare, later also a dramatist; poet Harry Guest was a teacher.

From 1964, Hampton read German and French at New College, Oxford, as a Sacher Scholar. He graduated with a starred First Class Degree in 1968.

Hampton became involved in the theatre while at Oxford University. The Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) performed his original play When Did You Last See My Mother?, about adolescent homosexuality. He drew from his own experiences at Lancing. Hampton sent the work to the play agent Peggy Ramsay, who interested William Gaskill in it. The play was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and soon transferred to the Comedy Theatre; in 1966, Hampton was the youngest writer in the modern era to have a play performed in the West End.Hampton's work on screenplays for the cinema also began around this time. He adapted this play for Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes, but a film version was never made.

From 1968 to 1970, Hampton worked as the Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre, and also as the company's literary manager. He continued to write plays: Total Eclipse, about the French poets and lovers Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, was first performed in 1967 and at the Royal Court in 1968, but it was not well received at the time. The Philanthropist (1970) is set in an English university town and was influenced by Molière's The Misanthrope. The Royal Court delayed a staging for two years because of an uncertainty over its prospects, but their production was one of the Royal Court's more successful works up to that point. The production transferred to the Mayfair Theatre in London's West End and ran for nearly four years, winning the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Comedy. It reached Broadway in New York City in 1971.

His agent told him after this success: “You’ve got a choice: you can write the same play over and over for the next 30 years" or, alternatively, "you can decide to do something completely different every time". He told her that he was writing a play about the "extermination of the Brazilian Indians in the 1960s". Savages, set during the period of the military government and derived from an article "Genocide in Brazil" by Norman Lewis, was first performed in 1973. His first produced film adaptation, of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1973), was directed by Patrick Garland, and stars Anthony Hopkins and Claire Bloom.

A sojourn in Hollywood led to an unproduced film adaptation of Marlowe's play Edward II and the original script for Carrington. This period also inspired his play Tales from Hollywood (1980). This is a somewhat fictionalised account of exiled European writers living in the United States during the Second World War. (The lead character is based on Ödön von Horváth, who died in Paris in 1938). The play also explores the different philosophies of Horwath and the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (who lived in the United States in the 1940s). Hampton told The Guardian critic Michael Billington in 2007: "I lean towards the liberal writer, Horvath, rather than the revolutionary Brecht. I suppose I'm working out some internal conflict". The play was commissioned by the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles; the Group first performed it in 1982. The play has been adapted in different versions for British and Polish television.

Hampton won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his screen adaptation of his play Dangerous Liaisons (1988). He worked on Carrington (1995) for 18 years, writing multiple drafts. The play explores the relationship between painter Dora Carrington and author Lytton Strachey. Hampton was nominated for a second Oscar for his screenplay and adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement.

Hampton's translation into English of Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay's Austrian musical Rebecca, based on Daphne du Maurier's novel of the same name, was supposed to premiere on Broadway in 2012. As of January 2013, its future was uncertain. The scheduled production became mired in scandal when "several investors were revealed to be concoctions of a rainmaking middleman."

Since the 1990s, Hampton has created the English translations of the works of French dramatists Yasmina Reza and Florian Zeller. Reza's Art ran for eight years in the West End, and also was produced in the United States.

Hampton both wrote and directed Imagining Argentina (2003), his adaptation of the 1987 novel by Lawrence Thornton. It explores society during the military dictatorship of Leopoldo Galtieri, when the government conducted a Dirty War against opponents, killing many in "forced disappearances." It starred Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson. According to Hampton, this period of Argentinian history had not inspired a dramatic work before. "I decided to do something which it would be difficult to finance at a time when, for once, I was bombarded with offers.

Hampton was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to drama.

Plays

• 1964 – When Did You Last See My Mother?
• 1967 – Total Eclipse
• 1969 – The Philanthropist
• 1973 – Savages
• 1975 – Treats
• 1984 – Tales From Hollywood
• 1991 – White Chameleon
• 1994 – Alice's Adventures Under Ground
• 2002 – The Talking Cure
• 2012 – Appomattox

Musicals (book and lyrics)

• 1993 – Sunset Boulevard with Don Black for Andrew Lloyd Webber
• 2001 & 2004 – Dracula, The Musical with Don Black for Frank Wildhorn
• 2012 – Rebecca (translated from German)
• 2013 – Stephen Ward the Musical with Don Black for Andrew Lloyd Webber

Adaptations

• 1977 – Tales from the Vienna Woods, Ödön von Horváth
• 1982 – The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. from the novella by George Steiner
• 1983 – Tartuffe by Molière
• 1985 – Les Liaisons Dangereuses from the novel by Choderlos de Laclos for the Royal Shakespeare Company
• 1993 – Sunset Boulevard for Andrew Lloyd Webber
• 2001 & 2004 – Dracula, The Musical for Frank Wildhorn
• 2006 – Embers from the novel by Sándor Márai
• 2009 – The Age of the Fish (in German Jugend ohne Gott) from the novel by Ödön von Horváth for the Theater in der Josefstadt