Peter Shaffer

Peter Shaffer has been around for a long time—he was born, after all, back in 1926—and he’s got quite a list of accomplishments under his well-worn belt to show for it. Shaffer, born to a Jewish family in Liverpool, England on May 15, 1926, is most known as a famous, award-winning British dramatist and highly accomplished playwright; interestingly, his twin brother, Anthony Shaffer, took up the same profession.

Shaffer wasn’t always interested in or involved in dramatic arts, however. In fact, as a young man, he worked as a coal miner as a Bevin Boy—Bevin Boys were British men conscripted to work in the country’s coal mines during the Second World War, from 1943 to 1945. He also studied history at Cambridge University’s Trinity College and moved on to work as a bookstore clerk as well as library assistant (New York Public Library).

When the 1950s hit, Shaffer began to explore his artistic abilities and try his hand at playwriting, in particular; this led to the creation of his very first play in 1954, The Salt Land, which was a huge success and was even presented on BBC.  He went on to write Balance of Terror and The Prodigal Father, both in 1957, after which he produced the famous Five Finger Exercise in 1958, which was directed by John Gielgud and garnered Shaffer two awards: the Evening Standard Drama Award (London) and the Drama Critics Award.

Shaffer continued to write into the 1960s, creating plays such as 1962’s The Private Ear and The Public Eye, The Establishment (1963), The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) about Spain’s conquest of Peru, and the very comedic Black Comedy (1967).

Shaffer’s most successful work was yet to come. After 1970’s The Battle of Shrivings, Shaffer playwrote Equus (1973) and Amadeus (1979). Equus, about a young stable boy who stabbed six horses’ eyes, blinding them, won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1975 as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award; Equus has recently be revived on Broadway, both in 2005 and in 2007, the latter in which Daniel Radcliffe (the film version of Harry Potter) starred, stirring more than his fair share of controversy by appearing naked in a scene. The play Amadeus, a fictional feature surrounding Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was also a resounding success, garnering Shaffer another Tony Award, as well as London’s Evening Standard Drama Award and Theatre Critics Award.

Several of Shaffer’s plays have been converted successfully onto film: most notably Five Finger Exercise and The Royal Hunt of the Sun in the 1960s, as well as Equus (1977) and Amadeus (1984). The film version of Amadeus won an impressive eight Academy Awards (one of which was the highly coveted Best Picture) and starred F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, and Jeffrey Jones, among others.

Since then, Shaffer has created a number of other plays (including Black Mischief, Lettice and Lovage, Whom Do I Have the Honour of Addressing?, and The Gift of the Gorgon) and been honored with the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement (1992), appointed Oxford University’s Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre (1994), and, finally, awarded Knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 2001.