Peter Morgan (born 10 April 1963) is an English film writer and playwright best known for writing the films and plays The Deal, The Queen, Frost/Nixon, and The Special Relationship.
Morgan was born in London, the son of refugees; his father Arthur Morgenthau was a German Jew who fled the Nazis, and his mother Inga a Catholic Pole who fled the Soviets. His father died when Morgan was aged 9. He attended boarding school at Downside School, Somerset. He gained a degree in Fine Art from the University of Leeds.
Morgan wrote television scripts throughout the 1990s, including an episode of Rik Mayall Presents... and the Comedy Premiere The Chest. He wrote the screenplay to the romantic comedy Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence (1998) and had some success with the TV series The Jury (2002). He broke through with The Deal, a 2003 television drama about the power-sharing deal between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that was struck in the Granita restaurant in London. He received his Academy Award-nomination for The Deal's follow-up, The Queen (2006) that showed how the death of Princess Diana impacted British Prime Minister Tony Blair and senior members of the Royal Family. His work on the film awarded him a Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press, and Helen Mirren won an Academy Award for Best Actress.
2006 also saw the release of The Last King of Scotland, the screenplay of which Morgan adapted with Jeremy Brock. In 2007 they jointly won a BAFTA Film Award for their work on the film.
Also in 2006, Morgan's first play, Frost/Nixon, was staged at the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London. Starring Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella as Richard Nixon, the play concerns the series of televised interviews that the disgraced former president granted Frost in 1977. These ended with his tacit admission of guilt regarding his role in the Watergate scandal. The play was directed by Michael Grandage and opened to enthusiastic reviews.
In May 2007, the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival honoured Morgan with the year's Kanbar Award for Excellence in Screenwriting.
In July 2009, filming begins on The Special Relationship, the third film of Morgan's "Blair trilogy". The film focuses on Blair's (again played by Michael Sheen) relationship with U.S president Bill Clinton between 1997 and 2000. Morgan was originally scheduled to direct the film (making his directorial debut) but pulled out a month before filming began. He was replaced by Richard Loncraine. In 2008 Morgan adapted John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy into a screenplay for Working Title Films.
He has since finished the script for Hereafter, a supernatural thriller "in the vein of The Sixth Sense". DreamWorks bought the screenplay on spec in March 2008. The development was later transferred to Warner Bros., and filming began in October 2009 under the direction of Clint Eastwood.
In 2008 the film Frost/Nixon, with Sheen and Langella playing the parts they had on stage, opened in the United States and Great Britain to excellent reviews.
In June 2009, it was announced that he would be the co-writer of the 23rd James Bond film. The Daily Telegraphs Mandrake diary reported in April 2010 that Morgan had quit the production after Sam Mendes was hired to direct, and that Patrick Marber would replace him. MGM dismissed the Telegraphs claims as speculation.
He lived in Battersea, south London, with his Austrian wife Lila Schwarzenberg (HSH Princess Anna Carolina of Schwarzenberg, daughter of Czech politician Karel Schwarzenberg) and their daughters and three sons. Peter Morgan and his family relocated to Vienna in the winter of 2006.
