"Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.""But I think the thing I'm proud of about the film is that there aren't many films - either independent films or mainstream Hollywood films - that are like this; it's of its own times, and it's the film Mike Nichols wanted to make.""But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.""I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure - the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play - and inelegant emotion.""I know it's a film and all of that, and it's a Hollywood film, but it kind of feels like this sometimes, when you're in pain and it hurts, and you're desperate. Or you are about to cross some moral line and it's so seductive and you just do... and all that.""I like them all - I don't always approve. I see myself as a sort of benevolent uncle to these characters, and I can see why they do what they do; sometimes they make some mistakes, but at heart I think they're decent.""I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally.""I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.""I'm a Golden Globe nominee, yes. It's very nice. It's a very nice thing, but I kind of think of all the awards I wasn't ever nominated for, for years and things.""I'm a happily married man and I think to get married you have to be optimistic.""I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency.""It doesn't really feel like it's got anything to do with me. I mean, I know I wrote it, and all that and invented the characters and made it up, but it's Mike's film, so doing the press and stuff, it feels a little bit inauthentic. I was just one component of it.""It's one of the reasons I don't do drugs. One sniff and I'd go all the way.""The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.""Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level.""Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.""When I look back I can't believe I was so stupid as to direct Dealer's Choice.""When you're in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you've reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years."
Marber was born in London, England, the son of a financial analyst, and was raised in Wimbledon. Educated at St Paul's School, Cranleigh School and Wadham College, Oxford, Marber was a writer and cast member on the radio shows On the Hour and Knowing Me, Knowing You, and their television spinoffs The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You... with Alan Partridge, after working for a few years as a stand-up comedian.
He reunited with the Knowing Me, Knowing You team in 2003 to record commentaries for the DVD release of the show. He also contributed some new in-character audio material to the DVD release of The Day Today in 2004. His first play was Dealer's Choice, which he also directed. Set in a restaurant and based around a game of poker (and partly inspired by his own experiences with gambling addiction), it opened at the National Theatre in February 1995, and won the 1995 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy.
After Miss Julie, a version of the Strindberg play Miss Julie, was broadcast on BBC television in the same year. In this, Marber moves the action to Britain in 1945, at the time of the Labour Party's victory in the general election, with Miss Julie as the daughter of a Labour peer. A stage version, directed by Michael Grandage, was first performed 2003 at the Donmar Warehouse, London by Kelly Reilly, Richard Coyle and Helen Baxendale. It later had a production at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway in 2009.
His play Closer, a comedy of sex, dishonesty and betrayal, opened at the National Theatre in 1997, again directed by Marber. This too won the Evening Standard award for Best Comedy, as well as the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards and Laurence Olivier awards for Best New Play. It has proved to be an international success, having been translated into thirty languages. A screen adaptation, written by Marber, was released in 2004, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen.
In Howard Katz, his next play, Marber presented very different subject matter: a middle-aged man struggling with life, death and religion. This was first performed in 2001, again at the National Theatre, but was less favourably received by the critics and has been less of a commercial success than some of his other work. A new production by the Roundabout Theatre Company opened Off-Broadway in March 2007, with Alfred Molina in the title role. A play for young people, The Musicians, about a school orchestra's visit to Russia, was performed for the National Theatre's Shell Connections programme in 2004, its first production being at the Sydney Opera House.
Don Juan in Soho, his contemporary rendering of Molière's comedy Don Juan, opened at the Donmar Warehouse in 2006, directed by Michael Grandage and with Rhys Ifans in the lead role.
He also co-wrote the screenplay for Asylum (2005), directed by David Mackenzie, and was sole screenwriter for the film Notes on a Scandal (2006), for which he earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Marber's theatre directing credits include Blue Remembered Hills by Dennis Potter (National Theatre), The Old Neighbourhood by David Mamet, (Royal Court Theatre, London) and The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, (Comedy Theatre, London).
In 2004, Marber was Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford University.
In 2002, Marber married Debra Gillett with whom he has three children, Albie, Fred and Sidney.
Patrick supports Arsenal and non-league outfit Lewes FC. He is one of the founding members of the Rooks125 who on 9th July 2010 formed the inaugural Board of the new Lewes Community Football Club ownership body.
