Ronald Harwood, a South African-born novelist and playwright who won his greatest acclaim as a screenwriter, winning an Academy Award in 2003 for “The Pianist,” a harrowing tale of a musical virtuoso caught in the Holocaust, died Sept. 8 in Sussex, England. He was 85.
Mr. Harwood left South Africa at 17 to study acting in England, only to realize that “as an actor, I had great energy and that was mistaken for talent.”
Later, after receiving a typewriter as a gift, he turned to writing, first as a novelist and later as the author of more than 20 plays and almost as many screenplays, three of which were nominated for Academy Awards.
Perhaps his most renowned play was “The Dresser,” which was drawn from his early experiences working with an aging Shakespearean actor, Donald Wolfit. Mr. Harwood was still in his teens when he joined Wolfit’s acting company, which toured England.
He worked as a business manager and part-time actor, but mostly as a “dresser,” or Wolfit’s assistant. Mr. Harwood’s 1980 play “The Dresser,” which he adapted for a 1983 film of the same name, depicts a theatrical company’s preparations for a production of “King Lear” during World War II, as bombs fall on England.
“What Ronnie Harwood has done very deftly,” the film’s director, Peter Yates, told the New York Times in 1983, “is to open up the story by taking you all round the theater before and during a performance: You see the front-of-house, the other dressing rooms, the manager’s office, the wings, all the paraphernalia and detail of a theater struggling to do a performance during wartime.”
The central focus is on the symbiotic and sometimes tortured relationship between Norman, the dresser played by Tom Courtenay, and “Sir,” the lordly actor played by Albert Finney. Norman helps Sir with his costumes and his lines, bathes his aching legs and appeals to the fading star’s vanity and honor to bolster his confidence. Mounting a production of “King Lear,” shabby costumes and all, thus becomes nothing less than a courageous act of heroism, a proud symbol of the unconquerable English spirit.
“It’s got to make you feel that putting on a performance of Lear,” Yates told the Times, “is civilization’s answer to the crisis of war; and, just as Lear defies the storm, so Sir challenges Hitler’s bombs by giving the best performance he can.”
Mr. Harwood, Yates, Finney and Courtenay all received Oscar nominations, and “The Dresser” was up for best picture. When it did not win a single Academy Award — “Terms of Endearment” won five Oscars that year — Mr. Harwood became cynical toward Hollywood.
“If I have an original idea, I write it as a play or a novel,” he told London’s Telegraph newspaper in 2003. “It’s a struggle to get a film made. If you write an original script, you have to get a director on board, wait for the money to be raised. It’s too daunting.”
As a result, all of Mr. Harwood’s screenplays were adapted from other writings. He sometimes reworked his own plays, including “Taking Sides,” a 2001 film about Berlin Philharmonic conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who chose to stay in Germany throughout World War II, raising questions about whether he collaborated with the Nazis.
When a French theatrical production of “Taking Sides” was presented in Paris, one of the people who saw it was Roman Polanski, the director of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown,” who was living in France after fleeing the United States in the 1970s to avoid being sentenced for having sexual contact with a 13-year-old girl.
Polanski asked Mr. Harwood, who was Jewish and had a love of music, if he would write a screenplay based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish concert pianist who lived in hiding in Warsaw during World War II. Mr. Harwood moved to Paris for six weeks while he and Polanski, who had fled the Polish city of Krakow as a child to escape persecution, worked on the script of “The Pianist.”
“It breaks every rule of storytelling,” Mr. Harwood told the Telegraph in 2003. “It has no plot. It’s just, ‘And then, and then, and then.’ Szpilman was simply lucky. But that was the point. His survival depends on that. We didn’t go in for a lot of explanation, which is one reason the film’s so unsentimental.”
Szpilman, portrayed by Adrien Brody in the 2002 film, survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw for five years. During the final months of the war, he was aided by a German officer who learned that Szpilman was a pianist and asked him to play.
Cold, emaciated and not having touched a keyboard in ages, Szpilman played a piece by Chopin. In the film, it is a scene of devastating power.
“There is no such thing as the ultimate truth about the Holocaust,” Mr. Harwood told the Wichita Eagle newspaper in 2003. “What we have is true for that person at that moment.”
Brody won an Oscar for best actor, Polanski won for best director, and Mr. Harwood won for best adapted screenplay. The Oscar for best picture went to the musical “Chicago.”
“Someone said to me that night,” Mr. Harwood told the Telegraph, “ ‘Let’s see — best actor, best director, best screenplay but not best film, how does that work?’ ”
Ronald Horwitz was born Nov. 9, 1934, in Cape Town, South Africa. His father, who fled Jewish pogroms in Lithuania, was a traveling salesman.
Young Ronald had an interest in the theater from childhood and was encouraged by his mother, who suggested that he study acting in England. He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, changing his name to Harwood.
He joined Wolfit’s theater company in 1953. Six years later, Mr. Harwood married Natasha Riehle — reputedly a descendant of Catherine the Great. Mr. Harwood was about to take a job as a construction worker when his wife’s father gave him a typewriter.
In three weeks, working day and night, Mr. Harwood wrote his first novel, “All the Same Shadows,” about racial injustice in South Africa. He wrote a script for a television movie, “Private Potter” (1962), that marked the first of many projects with Courtenay, including a 1970 adaptation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Mr. Harwood wrote his first feature film script, “A High Wind in Jamaica,” in 1965 and credited the director, Alexander Mackendrick, with teaching him the craft of screenwriting.
When Mr. Harwood won his Oscar in 2003, he was 68 and immediately became one of the film world’s busiest screenwriters.
“It must upset my critics terribly!” he told the Telegraph. “They wrote me off years ago, heh, heh, heh! And now I feel like I’m just beginning. So tough luck to ’em!”
He went on to write “The Statement” (2003), about a French Nazi collaborator pursued in his later years for his crimes; “Being Julia” (2004), with Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons, about an actress who falls for a younger man; Polanski’s production of “Oliver Twist” (2005); and an adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel “Love in the Time of Cholera” (2007), starring Javier Bardem.
Mr. Harwood received his third Academy Award nomination for his tour-de-force screenplay of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2007), based on the memoir of French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, who became paralyzed after a stroke. He could communicate only by blinking one eyelid.
Struggling with the screenplay, Mr. Harwood almost backed out of the project.
“Nothing concentrates the mind of a writer more wonderfully than the thought of having to give back the money,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Suddenly this idea burst into mind that he should be the camera.”
With that visual device, in which everything is seen as through Bauby’s blinking eye, the French-language film, directed by artist Julian Schnabel, gained its point of view. Mr. Harwood lost the Oscar to Joel and Ethan Coen for “No Country for Old Men.”
Mr. Harwood’s final screenplay was for “Quartet” (2012), based on his earlier play about a retirement home for musicians. The film, directed by Dustin Hoffman, reunited Mr. Harwood with Courtenay 50 years after they first worked together.
Mr. Harwood was a lifelong smoker who in 2004 refused to direct a Canadian production of “The Dresser” because of the country’s antismoking laws. He gave up cigarettes in 2013, after a heart attack.
His wife died in 2013. Survivors include three children.
Unlike other playwrights, such as his close friend Harold Pinter, Mr. Harwood seldom wrote about modern-day social issues. His imagination was excited more by the stories of overcoming adversity and by the power of art.
Not everything he wrote, however, was a rousing success. His 1985 play “Interpreters,” about two old lovers rekindling a romance, received middling reviews when it premiered in London, with Maggie Smith and Edward Fox in the leading roles.
During the play’s run, Mr. Harwood poked his head into Smith’s dressing room.
“Hello, Ronnie,” she said, “and what are you up to now?”
“Struggling with a new play, darling,” Mr. Harwood said.
Smith coolly replied, “Aren’t we all?”
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