Peter Shaffer

Peter Shaffer and his twin brother Anthony were born on May 15, 1926, in Liverpool, England, where Shaffer later attended prep school. In 1936 his family moved to London, where Shaffer attended Hall School and St. Paul's School. From 1944 to 1947, Shaffer worked in the Chislet coal mine, having been conscripted as one of the "Bevin Boys," essential workers in service to the country, organized by Ernest Bevin, Churchill's Minister of Labour. Shaffer found coal mining an arduous occupation which, he states, gave him great sympathy for the way many people are forced to spend their lives.

Shaffer then attended Trinity College in Cambridge, where he and Anthony co-edited the student magazine Grantha; he received a B.A. in History in 1950. During the following year, Shaffer, under the pseudonym Peter Antony, penned The Woman in the Wardrobe, the first of his three detective novels. He co-authored the second and third-—How Doth the Little Crocodile? (1952) and Withered Murder (1955)—with Anthony, who went on to write the enormously successful mystery Sleuth. It is interesting to note that Peter Shaffer's reverence for the structure and characters of the detective novel is apparent in many of plays, Equus included.

From 1951 to 1954, Shaffer lived in New York and worked a variety of jobs: at Doubleday's Book Shop, an airline terminal, Grand Central Station, Lord and Taylors department store, and the New York Public Library. Shaffer states that for years he labored under the impression that the passion he had developed for theatre could only be used as a pastime and that his daily profession had to be something "respectable." He found his year's worth of work in the Public Library's acquisitions department acutely boring, but he still resisted the urge to devote himself to playwriting until he spent two more years in London, working for Boosey and Hawkes music publishers.

In 1955, Shaffer wrote the television play The Salt Land; the following year, he quit Boosey and Hawkes and decided to "live now on [his] literary wits." From 1956 to 1957, Shaffer worked as a literary critic for the weekly review Truth; his Balance of Terror appeared on television, and The Prodigal Father was broadcast on the radio. 1958 marked the production of Shaffer's first stage play, Five Finger Exercise, directed by John Gielgud in very successful runs in both London and New York City; the play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the best foreign play of the 1959-60 season.

From 1961 to 1962 Shaffer incorporated his love for music (which, not incidentally, surfaces in such plays as Five Finger Exercise and Amadeus) into a stint as music critic for London's Time and Tide. In 1962, a double-bill of Shaffer's high comedies The Private Ear and The Public Eye was staged in London. A year later, he wrote a screenplay for William Golding's The Lord of the Flies with British director Peter Brook. The Royal Hunt of the Sun premiered at the Chicaster Festival in 1964 before moving to London's National Theatre; Sir Laurence Olivier then commissioned Black Comedy for the National Theatre's 1965 repertoire. At this time, Shaffer began dividing his time between living in Manhattan and England, and in1967 White Lies (one year later revised as White Liars) opened with the U. S. premier of Black Comedy in New York.

Shaffer wrote three major stage plays in the 1970s: The Battle of Shrivings (1970), Equus (1973), and Amadeus (1979). Included among the numerous awards Shaffer has won in his career are the 1975 Tony and 1975 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play for Equus, as well as the 1981 Tony and 1981 Outer Critics' Circle Award for Best Play for Amadeus. For his film adaptation of Amadeus in 1984, Shaffer won the 1985 Oscar for Best Screenplay. Following the success of Amadeus, Shaffer's biblical epic Yonadab premiered at London's National Theatre in 1985. In 1987, Shaffer was awarded the prestigious honorary title of Commander, Order of the British Empire. That same year, Shaffer wrote the comedy Lettice and Lovage for actress Maggie Smith; a revised version was produced in London in 1988 and New York in 1990. Shaffer returned to the radio in 1989 with the BBC-aired play Whom Do I Have the Honor of Addressing? Shaffer's most recent stage play was The Gift of the Gorgon, produced in London in 1992, the same year in which he won the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre.

A photograph of Peter Shaffer (new window will open)