Editing Pierre Boulle (section)

==''The Bridge over the River Kwai''==
{{Main|The Bridge over the River Kwai}}
While in Paris, Boulle used his war experiences in writing ''Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï'' (1952; ''[[The Bridge over the River Kwai]]''), which became a multi-million-copy worldwide bestseller, winning the French "''[[Prix Sainte-Beuve]]''". The book was a semi-fictional story based on the real plight of [[Allies of World War II|Allied]] [[POW]]s forced to build a {{convert|415|km|mi|abbr=on}} railway that passed over the bridge, and which became known as the "[[Death Railway]]". 16,000 prisoners and 100,000 Asian conscripts died during construction of the line.{{Citation needed|date=July 2017}} His character of Lt-Col. Nicholson was not based on the real Allied senior officer at the Kwai bridges, [[Philip Toosey]], but was reportedly an amalgam of his memories of collaborating French officers. Both the book and film outraged former prisoners because Toosey did not collaborate with the enemy, unlike the fictional Colonel Nicholson. Boulle outlined the reasoning which led him to conceive the character of Nicholson in an interview which forms part of the 1969 BBC2 documentary ''Return to the River Kwai'' made by former POW John Coast. A transcript of the interview and the documentary as a whole can be found in the new edition of John Coast's book ''Railroad of Death''.<ref>{{cite book|last=Coast|first=John|title=Railroad of Death|year=2014|publisher=Myrmidon|isbn=9781905802937}}</ref>

[[David Lean]] made the book into a [[The Bridge on the River Kwai|motion picture]] that won seven 1957 [[Academy Awards]], including the [[Academy Award for Best Picture|Best Picture]], and [[Academy Award for Best Actor|Best Actor]] for [[Alec Guinness]]. Boulle himself won the award for [[Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay|Best Adapted Screenplay]] despite not having written the screenplay and, by his own admission, not even speaking English. Boulle had been credited with the screenplay because the film's actual screenwriters, [[Carl Foreman]] and [[Michael Wilson (writer)|Michael Wilson]], had been [[Hollywood blacklist|blacklisted]] as communist sympathizers. Boulle was neither a socialist nor a communist.{{Source needed|date=June 2023}} The [[Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences|Motion Picture Academy]] added Foreman's and Wilson's names to the award in 1984.

[[Kim Novak]] accepted the Oscar on behalf of Pierre Boulle.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wX-rBzh_u8 |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211211/-wX-rBzh_u8| archive-date=11 December 2021 |url-status=live|title=The Bridge on the River Kwai and Designing Woman Win Writing Awards: 1958 Oscars|publisher=Oscar|access-date=11 February 2018}}{{cbignore}}</ref>