Educated St Paul's School & Trinity College, Cambridge. Worked in Aquisitions Dept. of New York Public Library and for music publisher Boosey & Hawkes before finding fame as playwright.
Academy Award for Best Writing Adapted Screenplay, Tony Award for Best Play, Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay - Motion Picture, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play, Shakespeare Prize, Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Broad...
Nominations
BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Virgin Atlantic Best New Play, BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay, David di Donatello for Best Foreign Screenplay
Movies
Amadeus, Equus, Follow Me!, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Five Finger Exercise
Star Sign
Taurus
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Quote
1
I think the live experience in the theatre is very important when you can see shocks and murmurs going through the house. It has a communal nature. A great play or a great production is a revelation, this is the function of all art, it doesn't have to be solemn - it's a moment, a leap of excitement inside oneself, which can be attached to a moral insight or a laugh, and it comes bolting out like rabbits out of a hedge.
2
[on using LSD] It was a transporting experience, expressed in very concrete images, places and periods. It involved both generic pictures [from China and the Congo] and more strictly autobiographical ones (a book-laden boy in perhaps 1850 walking to Hebrew School through a labyrinth of alleys, perhaps in Kiev). I have never forgotten it or moved far from the sense of wonder it provided and a fairly constant gratitude for the infinite complexity of being it revealed to me.
3
I think think some of the reasons I've had a sense of happiness in my life, a sense of fulfillment, is that I began with a sense of invisibility about myself. As I evolve I become more visible. When I'm 100, if I manage to write lots of plays, I can read them all in a row and it may give me some vague sense - only vague - of what I am and was.
4
When you first do a play, the actors tend to eye you ingratiatingly, with a kind of respectful hope, as if you are the repository of some great secret which they must have. Three weeks later, these roles are reversed. It is you, the author, who is sidling up to them nervously and saying in a low voice "I wonder if you'd mind putting in this line, or saying this to her". And quite often the erstwhile timid star is staring at you and saying "Oh no. he would never say that!" Being a playwright in rehearsal involves a necessary if saddening process of being gutted and then discarded. You are first welcomed and then shown the door.
5
I've often wondered, because of my frequent sojourns in America, how much good psychiatry and all the rest of it was doing those of my acquaintances who were in treatment. I know a couple who appear to have benefited from it, but most, whatever they may think, haven't changed at all. I began to wonder some time ago whether it might not be a false religion with a lot of worshipers.
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Fact
1
His play, "Amadeus" on Broadway in New York City was nominated for a 2000 Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for Best Revival of a Play.
2
His partner Robert Leonard died in 1990.
3
He was the son of Reka (Fredman) and Jack Shaffer, who were both of Eastern European Jewish descent.
4
He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1987 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to drama.
Has twice won Broadway's Tony Award as author of a Best Play winner: in 1975 for "Equus" and in 1981 for "Amadeus." He was also twice nominated as author of a Best Play nominee: in 1967 for "Black Comedy" and in 1991 for "Lettice and Lovage."
7
Both he and his brother Anthony Shaffer have adapted their own successful plays into successful films: Peter wrote Amadeus (1984), and Anthony wrote Sleuth (1972).
8
He was award Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire in the 2001 New Year's Honours List for his services to drama.
$2 Million
