Frederic Raphael

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2006

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the screen writer Frederic Raphael. For 50 years Frederic Raphael has written witty scripts for television and the silver screen. He won an Oscar for his film Darling, which starred Julie Christie, and became a household name with his television series The Glittering Prizes.

He was born in Chicago but came to England as a boy - where, his father advised him, he could grow up to be 'an English gentleman' rather than 'an American Jew'. While his parents did not want to disown their faith, nor did they want to be defined by it and they were very cautious about the way Jews were perceived in Britain before the Second World War. He was one of only a handful of Jewish boys at boarding school and was isolated and miserable there. But his loneliness led him to the solitary pursuit of writing - an occupation where he could right the wrongs he had suffered. A bright pupil, his own glittering prize was winning a scholarship to Cambridge - after that, he said, no other success in his life could compare.

For the past 50 years he has split his time between London, France and Greece - accompanied all the time by his wife, Sylvia-Betty.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Vorka Sto Yialo by Manos Tacticos & his Bouzoukis Book: Oxford Latin Dictionary Luxury: Mont Blanc pen, nibs and spiral squared notebooks

Transcript

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0:41.8	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:44.9	The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.
0:50.2	Music My castaway this week is a writer. Cosmopolitan, sharp-tongued and intellectually self-confident. His image can
1:12.1	sometimes appear forbidding. He is in fact a man with strong family bonds who's lived and
1:17.8	written happily in Greece, in France, and with rather mixed feelings in England for the past 50 years.
1:24.0	A Cambridge scholar, his first great success was the screenplay for Darling, the 1965 film starring Julie Christie and Dirk Bogod, for which he won an Oscar.
1:32.9	Other well-known films followed, but the work which identified him best was perhaps the BBC series The Glittering Prizes,
1:40.0	the story of a group of Cambridge graduates growing up in post-war Britain.
1:43.7	He's always denied it was
1:45.3	autobiographical, even though it deals in places with anti-Semitism, something he experienced
1:50.3	growing up in England. I have a love-hate relationship with this country, he says. I don't know a
1:55.9	writer who would bother to be a writer who wouldn't have a love-hate relationship with almost anything he wrote about.
2:02.3	He is Frederick Raphael. Do you have a love-hate relationship with writing itself, Frederick, or does it flow freely?
2:09.3	No, I confess that I really don't. Sometimes people invite one to lament about the lonely and often
2:16.7	humiliated life of writers, all of which is
	...

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