Who is Frederic Raphael?
Who exactly is Frederic Michael Raphael? Frederic Raphael (born 14 August 1931) is an American-British screenwriter, biographer, nonfiction writer, novelist, and journalist who has won BAFTA and Academy Awards.
Frederic Raphael was born in Chicago to an American Jewish mother, Irene Rose (nee Mauser), and a British Jewish father, Cederic Michael Raphael, who had been transferred to the United States from Shell’s London office.
Frederic Raphael was seven years old when his family moved to England much to his surprise, and settled in Putney, London. He went to Copthorne Preparatory School, Charterhouse School, and St John’s College, Cambridge for his education.
Raphael won an Oscar for his screenplay for the film Darling (1965), and he was nominated for another two years later for his screenplay for Two for the Road. He also wrote the screenplay for John Schlesinger’s 1967 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd.
His book reviews and articles have appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and The Sunday Times. He has written over twenty novels, the most well-known of which is the semi-autobiographical The Glittering Prizes (1976), which follows the lives of a group of Cambridge University undergraduates in postwar Britain as they progress through university and into the wider world. He received a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award for the original six-part BBC television series, from which the book was adapted.
Fame and Fortune, a sequel that takes the story up to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2010, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a further sequel, Final Demands, with Tom Conti as the central character Adam Morris, bringing the story to the late 1990s.
Frederic Raphael has written several history books, essay collections, and translations. In addition, he has written biographies of W. Somerset Maugham and Lord Byron. In 1964, he was elected to the Royal Society of Literature.
Raphael published Eyes Wide Open in 1999, a memoir of his collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay for Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. Raphael wrote a detailed account of his collaboration with Kubrick based on his own journals, but the book was publicly criticized by several of the director’s friends and family members, including Christiane Kubrick, Jan Harlan, and Michael Her [self-published source] for its unflattering portrayal of him.
Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise both criticized Raphael’s book after reading an article about it in The New Yorker.
That same year, Penguin Books released a new translation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, which served as the inspiration for Eyes Wide Shut, with a new introduction by Raphael.
On January 17, 1955, Frederic Rapahel married Sylvia Betty Glatt, and they had three children. Sarah Raphael, his daughter, was a portrait artist in England. She passed away in 2001.
Net Worth
The net worth of Frederic Raphael is unknown. However, given the longevity of his career and the number of works he has published over the years, it is safe to assume that he has amassed a substantial amount of wealth.
Frederic Raphael Awards
Academy Award, BAFTA, and Royal Society of Literature Fellow
Fiction
- Obbligato (1956)
- The Earlsdon Way (1958)
- The Limits of Love (1960)
- A Wild Surmise (1961)
- The Graduate Wife (1962)
- The Trouble with England (1962)
- Lindmann (1963)
- Orchestra and Beginners (1967)
- Like Men Betrayed (1970)
- Who Were You With Last Night? (1971)
- April, June and November (1972)
- Richard’s Things (1973)
- California Time (1975)
- The Glittering Prizes (1976) (adapted from the TV series)
- Sleeps Six and other stories (1979) (short story collection)
- Heaven and Earth (1985)
- Think of England (1986)
- After the War (1990)
- The Hidden Eye (1990)
- Of Gods and Men (1992)
- A Double Life (1993)
- Coast to Coast (1998)
- Fame and Fortune (2007) (sequel to The Glittering Prizes)
- Final Demands (2010) (sequel to Fame and Fortune)
- Private Views (2015)
- The Limits of Love (2020)
Non-fiction
- Somerset Maugham and his World (1976)
- The List of Books: A Library of Over 3000 Works (with Kenneth McLeish) Harmony Books, New York City, 1981. ISBN 0-517-54017-7.
- The Necessity of Anti-Semitism (1998)
- Popper: Historicism and Its Poverty 1998
- Some Talk of Alexander: A Journey Through Space and Time in the Greek World (2006)
- Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature (2007) (Illustrated by Barry Moser)
- How Stanley Kubrick Met His Waterloo (2011) for the Wall Street Journal[12]
- A Jew Among Romans: The Life and Legacy of Flavius Josephus (2013)
- Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (2013) with Joseph Epstein
- Where Were We?: The Conversation Continues (2015) with Joseph Epstein
- Anti-Semitism (2015)
- TranslationsEdit
- The serpent son = Oresteia by Aeschylus (translated with Kenneth McLeish) (1978)
- The Poems of Catullus (translated with Kenneth McLeish) (1979)
- Memoirs
- Eyes Wide Open (1999)
- Personal Terms (2001)
- The Benefit of Doubt: Essays (2003)
- A Spoilt Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (2003)
- Rough Copy: Personal Terms 2 (2004)
- Cuts and Bruises: Personal Terms 3 (2006)
- Ticks and Crosses: Personal Terms 4 (2009)
- Ifs and Buts: Personal Terms 5 (2011)
- There and Then: Personal Terms 6 (2013)
- Going Up: To Cambridge and Beyond – A Writer’s Memoir (2015)
- Against the Stream: Personal Terms 7 (2018)
