Christopher Hampton

Christopher Hampton, born on 26 January 1946 in Faial, Azores, to British parents Dorothy Patience and Bernard Patrick Hampton, is a playwright, screenwriter, translator, and composer whose Broadway credits include The Philanthropist, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Sunset Boulevard, and Dracula, the Musical. His father worked as a marine telecommunications engineer for Cable & Wireless, a profession that brought the family to Aden, Yemen; Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt; Hong Kong; and Zanzibar. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, the family was forced to leave Egypt in the middle of the night, abandoning their possessions.

Hampton attended a preparatory school in Reigate, Surrey, before enrolling at Lancing College in West Sussex at age thirteen, where he earned house colours for boxing and held the rank of sergeant in the Combined Cadet Force. Among his contemporaries at Lancing was David Hare, who would also become a dramatist. From 1964, Hampton studied German and French at New College, Oxford, as a Sacher Scholar, graduating with a starred First Class Degree in 1968. While at Oxford, the university's dramatic society staged his original play When Did You Last See My Mother?, a work about adolescent homosexuality drawn from his experiences at Lancing. The play was subsequently performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London before transferring to the Comedy Theatre, making Hampton, in 1966, the youngest writer in the modern era to have a play produced in the West End.

From 1968 to 1970, Hampton served as Resident Dramatist and literary manager at the Royal Court Theatre. His play Total Eclipse, concerning the relationship between French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, received its first performance at the Royal Court in September 1968. The Philanthropist, which reached Broadway in 1971, premiered in 1970 and was influenced by Molière's The Misanthrope. Set in an English university town, it ran for nearly four years following its West End transfer to the Mayfair Theatre and won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Comedy. Hampton's first produced film adaptation, of Ibsen's A Doll's House, was directed by Patrick Garland in 1973 and starred Anthony Hopkins and Claire Bloom. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976.

A period in Hollywood produced an unproduced adaptation of Marlowe's Edward II and an original script for Carrington, experiences that informed his 1982 play Tales from Hollywood, a fictionalized account of exiled European writers in the United States during the Second World War. The play, commissioned by the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, centers on a character based on Ödön von Horváth and also examines the philosophy of Bertolt Brecht. Hampton worked on Carrington for eighteen years across multiple drafts; the resulting film, which he directed, starred Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce and explored the relationship between painter Dora Carrington and author Lytton Strachey.

Hampton's adaptation of his play Les Liaisons Dangereuses for the screen, released as Dangerous Liaisons in 1988 and directed by Stephen Frears with Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer, earned him the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He received two further Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay: for Atonement in 2007, directed by Joe Wright and starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and Saoirse Ronan, and for The Father in 2020, for which he won a second Academy Award.

On Broadway, Hampton collaborated with Don Black on the book and lyrics for Sunset Boulevard, which opened in 1994. The production earned both men Tony Awards for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score in 1995. Hampton's Broadway credits also include Dracula, the Musical.

Since the 1990s, Hampton has produced English translations of works by French dramatists Yasmina Reza and Florian Zeller. Reza's Art ran for eight years in the West End and was also produced in the United States. His translation of Reza's God of Carnage became the third-longest-running Broadway play of the 2000s, with 24 previews and 452 regular performances, and garnered six Tony nominations and three wins in 2009. Hampton's translations of Zeller's work include The Father, staged in 2016, and The Height of the Storm, staged in 2019, as well as The Seagull in 2008. Hampton was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1999 Birthday Honours for services to literature.