Editing Robert Bolt (section)

==Career==
He was born in [[Sale, Greater Manchester|Sale]], Cheshire, to Methodist parents; his father owned a small furniture shop.<ref>A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt, Leonard Smith, Macmillan Master Guides, 1985, p. 3</ref> At [[Manchester Grammar School]] his affinity for Sir [[Thomas More]] first developed. After leaving school aged sixteen, he worked in an insurance office, which he disliked; after studying in the evening for five weeks he passed three A-levels and went on to attend the [[University of Manchester]], from which, after a year, he undertook wartime service, initially as a pilot officer candidate in the [[Royal Air Force|RAF]] (air-sickness preventing him from continuing past training) from 1943 to 1946. He then served as an Army officer in West Africa until 1947, when he returned to the University of Manchester and spent three years completing his honours degree in history.<ref>A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt, Leonard Smith, Macmillan Master Guides, 1985, p. 4</ref> Following this, he took a teaching diploma from the [[University of Exeter]].<ref>''Robert Bolt: Scenes from Two Lives'', Adrian Turner, Hutchinson, 1998, p. 66</ref> For many years he taught in the [[English studies|English]] and History departments at [[Millfield School]] and only became a full-time writer at the age of 33 when his play ''[[The Flowering Cherry]]'' was staged in London in 1958, with [[Celia Johnson]] and [[Ralph Richardson]].

He first earned notice for his original play ''[[A Man for All Seasons (play)|A Man for All Seasons]]'' – a depiction of Sir Thomas More's clash with King [[Henry VIII]] over his divorce from [[Catherine of Aragon]] – which won awards on the stage and in its film version, though subsequently most of his writing was screenplays for films or television.

Bolt's writing included primarily dramatic works that placed their protagonists in tension with the prevailing society. He won praise for ''A Man for All Seasons'', his first iteration of this theme, but he developed it in his existential script for ''[[Lawrence of Arabia (film)|Lawrence of Arabia]]'' (1962). In ''Lawrence'', he succeeded where several before him had failed at turning [[T. E. Lawrence]]'s ''[[Seven Pillars of Wisdom]]'' into a cogent screenplay by transforming the entire book into a search for the identity of its author, presenting Lawrence as a misfit both in English and Arab society.

It was at this time that Bolt himself fell foul of the law, and as part of the [[Committee of 100 (United Kingdom)|Committee of 100]] he was arrested and imprisoned for protesting against nuclear proliferation. He refused to be "bound over" (i.e., to sign a declaration that he would not engage in such activities again) and was sentenced to one month in prison because of this.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-robert-bolt-1574410.html |title=Obituary: Robert Bolt |newspaper=[[The Independent]] |last=Calder |first=John |date=23 February 1995 |access-date=21 July 2016}}</ref> [[Sam Spiegel]], the producer of ''Lawrence'', persuaded Bolt to sign after he had served only two weeks. Bolt later regretted his actions and did not speak to Spiegel again after the film was completed.

Later in ''[[Doctor Zhivago (film)|Doctor Zhivago]]'', Bolt invested [[Boris Pasternak]]'s novel with his own characteristic sense of narrative and dialogue – human, short and telling. ''[[The Bounty (1984 film)|The Bounty]]'' was Bolt's first project after a stroke, which resulted in some loss of speech and partial paralysis. In it, [[Fletcher Christian]] takes the "Lawrence" role of a man in tension with his society who in the process loses touch with his own identity. ''[[The Mission (1986 film)|The Mission]]'' was Bolt's final film project, and it once again represented his thematic preoccupations, this time with 18th-century [[Society of Jesus|Jesuits]] in South America.

Bolt's final produced script was ''Political Animal'', later made into the TV movie ''Without Warning: The James Brady Story'' (1991), about the attempted assassination of [[Ronald Reagan]] and the struggles of his press secretary [[James Brady]] to recover from a near-fatal gunshot injury he received in the process. Bolt was initially reluctant to make the film, but after meeting Brady he felt he could relate to Brady's struggles with a head injury, and many of his own experiences recovering from his stroke found their way into the script.