A tribute to ronald harwood | thearticle

Ronald Harwood (born Horwitz) died on 8 September, aged 85. Harwood was astonishingly prolific. He began writing in 1960 and wrote and edited more than thirty books, twenty screenplays and

more than twenty stage plays. But he is best known for the screenplays for “The Dresser” (for which he was nominated for an Oscar) and “The Pianist“, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award

for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was also nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2007). Harwood was fascinated with theatre. He was Donald

Wolfit’s personal dresser for five years (the experience was the basis for his play and later screenplay, “The Dresser”). But he was also drawn to extreme situations. Two of his most

acclaimed screenplays were about men trying to cope with terrifying ordeals: a pianist in Warsaw surviving the Holocaust and Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir about living with locked-in

syndrome after a massive stroke. His third great subject was the Nazi period. He wrote screenplays about the assassination of Heydrich “Operation Daybreak”, “The Statement” (about a French

collaborator), “The Pianist” and “Taking Sides”, the play about the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who remained in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, and the play,

“Collaboration”, about Richard Strauss. He was especially drawn to the moral complexity of collaboration, in particular the stories of Furtwängler, Strauss and the French collaborator, Paul

Touvier. Harwood was an actors’ writer. Some of the best actors of his time won acclaim performing the leading roles he created. Freddie Jones, Ken Stott and Albert Finney played “Sir”, the

grand old Shakespearean actor, in “The Dresser”, with Tom Courtenay giving one of his best performances as the dresser. Daniel Massey and Michael Pennington both played Furtwängler on stage,

while Antony Sher played Mahler in his play, “Mahler’s Conversion”. Finney worked with Harwood again as the old Classics teacher, Crocker-Harris, in the film of “The Browning Version”. What

is also striking about Harwood’s work is how many of his most famous characters are male and work in the arts — Mahler, Strauss, Furtwängler, the pianist Szpilman, the characters in

“Quartet” and, of course, “Sir” and his dresser, Norman. “Civilisation is no defence against barbarism,” he once said. “Germany was the most cultured nation in Europe and look what

happened.” He was an odd mix, part outsider, part establishment figure. Like his cousin, Antony Sher, he was a South African Jew. “I always think of myself as slightly outside,” he said.

“You can’t be more outside than a Jewish immigrant from South Africa, can you?” And yet he was knighted and worked with some of the most famous actors and directors of his time: McKellen,

Hopkins, Finney, Polanski and Pinter. Few writers won more awards: a knighthood and CBE, an Academy Award and Bafta, a teaching post at Oxford and any number of honorary fellowships and

degrees. The_ Spectator _once called him “the patriotic playwright”. There was something very English about him. His was a world of Shakespearean actors and public school teachers — but

perhaps his best known works were about people facing difficult choices in the dark heart of 20th century Europe, from Berlin to Warsaw. Should Mahler convert to Christianity, should the

German conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic stay in Nazi Germany? In his play about Richard Strauss, “Collaboration”, Harwood’s Strauss says, in 1949, “What would you have done? My motives

may not have been pure, but they were human.” Harwood’s greatest characters are human, all too human — and that’s why his best work will endure after some of his more fashionable

contemporaries are forgotten.