In praise of the patriotic playwright

Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning writer of The Pianist and The Dresser, tells Tim Walker that he is delighted to be in demand — but never wants to be ‘fashionable’

I first came face to face with Ronald Harwood three years ago as we were waiting for our coats after the party to mark the opening of the Saatchi Gallery in the old County Hall building in London. Two disgruntled lines of people had converged and he thought I was queue-barging and I thought he was. It could have gone either way. Either a big row or the start of a friendship. Happily, it was the latter.

Harwood does charm but he also does fury. On that occasion I wasn’t quite sure which I was going to get. His plays and screenplays invariably have the same unpredictable quality, the same edginess and simmering tensions.

At 71, he ought, however, to be feeling content. His telephone has been ringing off the hook with offers of work ever since he picked up his Oscar for Best Screenplay for The Pianist in 2003. The statuette that he has on his mantelpiece has not, of course, made the process of writing any easier. He still has to drill and coerce his words into line, while he feels they would have fallen in of their own volition for a ‘natural writer’ like Evelyn Waugh.

He has two plays about to open in the West End — Collaboration, about the pro-Nazi composer Richard Strauss’s complicated relationship with the Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig, and An English Tragedy, the story of John Amery, the son of a Tory grandee who was hanged for treason after the second world war. They will be directed by Peter Hall and Michael Blakemore respectively.

In September, filming begins on two of his screenplays: an adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, which will be directed by Mike Newell, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the journalist who, after a stroke, wrote a book compiled from letters he had communicated by blinks of an eyelid.