[1] After attending Sea Point High School,[2] Harwood moved from Cape Town to London in 1951 to pursue a career in the theatre.
[3] After training for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he joined the Shakespeare Company of Sir Donald Wolfit.
He would later draw on this experience when he wrote the stage play, The Dresser, and the biography, Sir Donald Wolfit CBE: His life and work in the Unfashionable Theatre.
[4][5] In 1960, Harwood began a career as a writer and published his first novel, All the Same Shadows in 1961, the screenplay for Private Potter (1962) from his television drama, and the stage play, March Hares in 1964.
One of the recurring themes in Harwood's work was his fascination with the stage, its performing artists and artisans, as displayed in The Dresser, After the Lions (about Sarah Bernhardt), Another Time (a semi-autobiographical piece about a gifted South African pianist), Quartet (about ageing opera singers), and his non-fiction book All the World's a Stage, a general history of theatre.
His work focusing on this period includes the films Operation Daybreak (covering the assassination by the Czechoslovakian Resistance of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich), The Statement (a fictionalized account of the post-War life-on-the-run of French collaborator Paul Touvier), The Pianist (an adaptation of the autobiography of the Jewish-Polish musician Władysław Szpilman covering his survival during the Nazi occupation of Poland), the play later adapted to film Taking Sides (focused on the post-War "de-Nazification" investigation of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler), the play Collaboration (about the composer Richard Strauss and his partnership with the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig), and the play An English Tragedy (dealing with the British fascist John Amery).
He was awarded a DLitt degree from Keele University in 2002,[8] honoured with a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Krastyo Sarafov National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts (Sofia, Bulgaria) in 2007, made an Honorary Fellow of the Central School of Speech and Drama (London, England) in 2007, and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Chichester in 2009.