Peter Morgan

For other people named Peter Morgan, see Peter Morgan (disambiguation).

Peter Morgan
Morgan at a Hereafter press conference, 2010
Born	(1963-04-10) 10 April 1963 London, England, UK
Occupation	screenwriter, playwright
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Leeds
Period	1988–present
Genre	Comedy, drama, historical fiction
Notable works	The Queen Frost/Nixon Rush
Spouse	Lila Schwarzenberg (m. 1997)
Children	6

Peter Julian Robin Morgan CBE (born 10 April 1963) is a British film writer and playwright. Morgan is best known for writing the historical films and plays The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United and Rush.

Early life

Morgan was born in Wimbledon, London. His mother, Inga (née Bojcek), was a Catholic Pole who fled the Soviets, and his father, Arthur Morgenthau, was a German Jew who fled the Nazis, arriving in London in 1933. His father died when Morgan was nine years old. Morgan attended boarding school at Downside School, Somerset, and gained a degree in Fine Art from the University of Leeds.

Career

Morgan wrote television scripts throughout the 1990s, including an episode of Rik Mayall Presents... and the Comedy Premiere The Chest. He wrote the screenplay to the romantic comedy Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence (1998) and had some success with the TV series The Jury (2002). He broke through with The Deal, a 2003 television drama about the power-sharing deal between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that was struck in the Granita restaurant in London. He received his Academy Award-nomination for The Deal's follow-up, The Queen (2006) that showed how the death of Princess Diana impacted Blair and the Royal Family. His work on the film awarded him a Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press, and Helen Mirren won numerous awards for playing the title role.

2006 also saw the release of The Last King of Scotland, the screenplay of which Morgan adapted with Jeremy Brock. In 2007 they jointly won a BAFTA Film Award for their work on the film.

Also in 2006, Morgan's first play, Frost/Nixon, was staged at the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London. Starring Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella as Richard Nixon, the play concerns the series of televised interviews that the disgraced former president granted Frost in 1977. These ended with his tacit admission of guilt regarding his role in the Watergate scandal. The play was directed by Michael Grandage and opened to enthusiastic reviews.

In May 2007, the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival honoured Morgan with the year's Kanbar Award for Excellence in Screenwriting.

In July 2009, filming begins on The Special Relationship, the third film of Morgan's "Blair trilogy". The film focuses on Blair's (again played by Michael Sheen) relationship with U.S president Bill Clinton between 1997 and 2000. Morgan was originally scheduled to direct the film (making his directorial debut) but pulled out a month before filming began. He was replaced by Richard Loncraine. In 2008 Morgan adapted John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy into a screenplay for Working Title Films.

He has since finished the script for Hereafter, a supernatural thriller "in the vein of The Sixth Sense". DreamWorks bought the screenplay on spec in March 2008. The development was later transferred to Warner Bros. and filming began in October 2009 under the direction of Clint Eastwood.

In 2008 the film Frost/Nixon, with Sheen and Langella playing the parts they had on stage, opened in the United States and Great Britain to excellent reviews.

In June 2009, it was announced that he would be the co-writer of Skyfall, the 23rd James Bond film. The Daily Telegraph's Mandrake diary reported in April 2010 that Morgan had quit the production after Sam Mendes was hired to direct, and that Patrick Marber would replace him. MGM dismissed the Telegraph's claims as speculation.

Morgan has recently started writing the screenplay for an upcoming biopic about rock musician Freddie Mercury, the lead vocalist, and songwriter, for the rock band Queen.

He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to drama.

Personal life

Morgan married Anna Carolina Schwarzenberg (born.1968), daughter of Czech politician Karel Schwarzenberg, civilly in London on 28 July 1997 and religiously at Murau on 6 September 1997. They have six children. They lived in Battersea, South London until the winter of 2006, when the family moved to Vienna.

List of works

Television

• Shalom Joan Collins (1989) (co-writer)
• Rik Mayall Presents… (1993) (1 episode: "Mickey Love")
• Comedy Premieres: The Chest (1997)
• Metropolis (2000)
• The Jury (2002)
• The Deal (2003)
• Henry VIII (2003)
• Colditz (2005)
• Longford (2006)
• The Special Relationship (2010)
• The Jury II (2011)
• The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies (2014)

Theatre

• Pax Britannica (1986) (co-writer)
• Frost/Nixon (2006)
• The Audience (2013)

Film

• Dear Rosie (1990) (short; co-writer)
• King Ralph (1991) (rewrites)
• The Silent Touch (1992) (co-writer)
• Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence (1998)
• The Queen (2006)
• The Last King of Scotland (2006) (co-writer)
• The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
• Frost/Nixon (2008)
• The Damned United (2009)
• State of Play (2009) (rewrites)
• Hereafter (2010)
• 360 (2011)
• Rush (2013)
• Solace (2015)
• Mercury (2015)
• Three Sixty

External links

• Profile in the Observer, September 2006
• Peter Morgan at the Internet Movie Database
• Peter Morgan: Screenwriting Lecture part of the BAFTA Screenwriters on Screenwriting series.