Sir David Rippon Hare FRSL (born 5 June 1947) is an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director.
Best known for his stage work, Hare has also enjoyed great success with films, receiving two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing The Hours in 2002 and The Reader in 2008.
In the West End, he had his greatest success with the plays Plenty (1978), which he adapted into a 1985 film starring Meryl Streep, Racing Demon (1990), Skylight (1997), and Amy's View (1998).
He wrote screenplays for films including the Stephen Daldry dramas The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008) and BBC's Page Eight (2011) and Netflix's Collateral (2018).
David Rippon Hare[citation needed] was born on 5 June 1947[1] in St Leonards-on-Sea, Hastings, Sussex, and was raised – first in a flat, then in a semi-detached house – in Bexhill-on-Sea,[2][3] the son of Agnes Cockburn (née Gilmour) and Clifford Theodore Rippon Hare, a passenger ship's purser in the Merchant Navy.
In a mixed review, The New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich wrote: "The play is in part about conflicting points of view – about how reactionaries and leftists look at geopolitics, how journalists and novelists look at events and how the West and the Third World look at each other.
The play, a satire on the mid-1980s newspaper industry, in particular the Australian media and press baron Rupert Murdoch,[11][12] stars Anthony Hopkins in a role that earned him the Laurence Olivier Award.
Hare became the associate director of the National Theatre in 1984, and has since seen many of his plays produced, including his trilogy about major British institutions: Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, and The Absence of War.
He has also directed many other plays aside from his own works, notable examples being The Pleasure Principle by Snoo Wilson, Weapons of Happiness by Howard Brenton, and King Lear by William Shakespeare for the National Theatre.
[13] In 1990, Hare wrote Racing Demon; part of a trio of plays about British institutions, it focuses on the Church of England, and tackles issues such as gay ordination, and the role of evangelism in inner-city communities.
[15] In 2001, Hare wrote My Zinc Bed, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre starring Tom Wilkinson, Julia Ormond, and Steven Mackintosh.
The film starred an ensemble cast that included Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman as women from three different time periods struggling against adversity.
[citation needed] In 2008, he adapted Bernhard Schlink's 1995 novel into Stephen Daldry's film The Reader starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes.
The film focuses on a romance in the 1950s between a teenaged boy and an older woman who is later discovered to have been a Nazi guard and is on trial for committing war crimes during the Holocaust.
[21] In November 2012, The New School for Drama selected Hare as temporary Artist-in-residence, during which he interacted with student playwrights about his experience in varying mediums.
"[26] In 2016, Hare wrote the screenplay for Denial based on Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier.
[citation needed] In 2020, Hare contracted COVID-19, an experience reflected in his monologue Beat the Devil, with Ralph Fiennes in the starring role.
[29] A new play titled Grace Pervades and starring Ralph Fiennes is set to premiere in summer 2025 at Theatre Royal, Bath.
In January 2015, Hare broadcast the BBC Radio 4 appeal to raise money for the Multiple System Atrophy Trust, which was founded by Matheson.