Golden Globe winner Peter Straughan due at Tyneside Cinema
Congratulations to Peter Straughan for winning the Golden Globe (Best Screenplay) for Conclave, thereby flying the flag for an excellent film which was also nominated in five other categories.
Hopes must be high that the Gateshead-born screenwriter’s success will be repeated at the Oscars (shortlists to be announced on Friday, January 17) and at the BAFTAs (Wednesday, January 15).
The screenplay category at the Oscars is divided into two with Conclave qualifying for Best Adapted (as opposed to Best Original) Screenplay, being the screen version of Robert Harris’s novel of 2016.
Peter’s screenplay has been nominated widely and has already emerged the winner at film critics’ association events in the United States, in St Louis and Washington DC.
As far as the Oscars are concerned, he has been there before.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which he adapted with his late wife Bridget O’Connor from the John le Carré novel, earned them a nomination in 2012 while winning a BAFTA.
Peter’s early creative impulses were towards music and for a time he was the bass player in the band The Honest Johns.
But he studied English Lit at Newcastle University and took a play up to the Edinburgh Fringe.
The theatre claimed him before his move into screenwriting. He won the playwriting competition at the People’s Theatre in the 1990s, earned a bursary from New Writing North and wrote plays that were staged at Live Theatre and Northern Stage.
That seems a long time ago.
When I last spoke to him in 2014, he was working on Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the first two of Hilary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell (he also adapted the third, The Mirror and the Light, which was broadcast at the end of last year).
He told me that working with “really great writers” was particularly rewarding.
“You actually feel liberated rather than inhibited because there is so much there,” he said.
Whatever there is in Robert Harris’s novel about the election of a new pope certainly found its way into the film which is utterly absorbing and will surely not go through the awards season empty handed.
Peter will be back at Live Theatre at the end of the month speaking at a Screenwriting Weekender.
That’s sold out but at 1pm on Saturday, February 1, he is due to introduce Conclave before its final screening at the Tyneside Cinema and there are still some seats available.