Raphael was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Irene Rose (née Mauser) and Cedric Michael Raphael, an employee of the Shell Oil Co. With his parents, he emigrated to Putney, England in 1938.

Raphael was educated at two independent schools: Copthorne Preparatory School, near Crawley in West Sussex and Charterhouse School (Lockites) in Godalming in Surrey, followed by St John's College at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge.

Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling, and two years later received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1967 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd directed by John Schlesinger.

His articles and book reviews appear in a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and The Sunday Times. He has published more than twenty novels, the best-known of which is the semi-autobiographical The Glittering Prizes (1976), which traces the lives of a group of Cambridge University undergraduates in post-war Britain as they move through university and into the wider world. The original six-part BBC television series, from which the book was adapted, won him a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award. Fame and Fortune, which continues the story to 1979, was adapted in 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, television channels having refused to commission the sequel themselves. In 2010, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a further sequel in a series entitled Final Demands, with Tom Conti as Adam Morris, the central character, bringing the story to the late 1990s.

Raphael has also published several history books, collections of essays and translations. He has also written biographies of Somerset Maugham and Lord Byron. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964.

In 1999, Raphael published Eyes Wide Open, a memoir of his collaboration with the director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final movie. That year, Penguin Books also published a new translation of Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story, the basis for Eyes Wide Shut, featuring an introduction by Raphael.

Christiane Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick's widow, distanced herself in 1999 from Frederic Raphael's book Eyes Wide Open - A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick, in which Raphael reported about the origin of the film Eyes Wide Shut, and accused him of abuse of confidence as well as disparagement of her deceased husband.

He married Sylvia Betty Glatt on January 17, 1955 and their children are Paul Simon a film producer, Sarah Natasha (1960-2001) who was a painter, and Stephen Matthew Joshua a screenwriter.

Fiction

• Obbligato 1956
• The Earlsdon Way 1958
• The Limits of Love 1960
• A Wild Surmise 1961
• The Graduate Wife 1962
• The Trouble with England 1962
• Lindmann 1963
• Orchestra and Beginners 1967
• Like Men Betrayed 1970
• Who Were You With Last Night? 1971
• April, June and November 1972
• Richard’s Things 1973
• California Time 1975
• The Glittering Prizes 1976
• Oxbridge Blues 1979
• After the War 1990
• Fame and Fortune (sequel to The Glittering Prizes) 2007
• Final demands (sequel to Fame and fortune) 2010

Nonfiction

• Somerset Maugham and his World 1976
• The Poems of Catullus (with Kenneth McLeish) 1979
• The List of Books: A library of over 3000 works (with Kenneth McLeish) Harmony Books, New York, 1981. ISBN 0-517-540177.
• The Necessity of Anti-semitism 1998
• Eyes Wide Open 1999
• Personal Terms 2001
• Essays 2003
• A Memoir of a Childhood 2003
• Personal Terms 2 2004
• Personal Terms 3 2006
• A Journey Through Space and Time in the Greek World 2006

Screenplays (partial list)

• Nothing But the Best 1964
• Darling 1965
• Far from the Madding Crowd 1967
• Two for the Road 1968
• Daisy Miller 1974
• The King's Whore (1990)
• Eyes Wide Shut 1999
• Coast to Coast 2003