The man who rewrites history

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10 April 2012

People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not," says Britain's most talented scriptwriter, Peter Morgan. "Well, to me history is just a series of elaborate fictions."

Ever since he nailed the dysfunctional Blair/Brown partnership in Channel 4's The Deal in 2003, the 43-year-old Londoner has been the man you go to if you want recent history re-imagined as utterly compelling drama. Lately, an "entirely accidental" logjam of his fact-based fictions (he hates the term "docudrama") has made his name ubiquitous.

He gave Helen Mirren her best ever role in Stephen Frears's film The Queen, as a monarch squaring up to Tony Blair in the days after Princess Diana's death. His acclaimed stage play Frost/Nixon, dramatising the chat show host's 1977 TV interviews with the disgraced American President, is about to transfer from the Donmar to the West End.

Days ago, his screen adaptation of Giles Foden's novel about Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, premiered to rave reviews at the London Film Festival. And last night, C4 broadcast Longford, his controversial dramatisation of the titular peer's selfdestructive obsession with child-murderer Myra Hindley.

In all of them, Morgan gives the impression he knows, more than the protagonists do, what's really going on.

The sudden pile-up of his "faction" projects has brought him intense, and in some ways unwelcome attention. "The fact that they have all come together in this compressed way means a spotlight has focused more tightly on what they are," he says, adding that he is "more bemused than anybody - except, perhaps my mother" to find himself in this odd, provocative writerly niche.

Defending his own versions of these historical stories, he points out that when he met the people involved in the Nixon interviews, including David Frost and his thenproducer John Birt, "they all had wildly differing perceptions of what had gone on in that room.

"It was the same when I researched The Queen: each palace had a completely different, politicised, spun version of events - St James's representing Charles, Kensington Palace representing Diana, Buckingham Palace representing the Queen, Downing Street ..."

Morgan collected a similar kaleidoscope of impressions from those who had known Hindley, who died in prison in 2002. And there was predictable tabloid uproar when it leaked out that Morgan's portrait of the "evil monster" was evenhanded, even sympathetic.

"It's just lazy, that default position of hating," says the writer. "I think she was guilty, but that regardless of her guilt and regardless of her lack of contrition, what was done to her, in terms of the law, was still an abomination.

"She was kept in prison because of her notoriety, and her notoriety was entirely due to the fact that she was a woman, so she was imprisoned because of her gender. I don't care if rehabilitation rates for paedophiles are bad - there is rehabilitation, people can change and forgiveness is possible."

Peter Stanford, Longford's friend and chronicler, also questioned Morgan's portrayal of the peer and his family, despite having been employed as an adviser on the film. "I think that was a biographer needing to reclaim his authority," Morgan ripostes. Does he feel he owes a duty to the real people he writes about, though? "I think I owe them respect and compassion," he says, "but that doesn't mean I can't still sit in fierce judgment on them."

People tell him he was nice to the Queen in Frears's film. "I say, really? Where? As far as I'm aware I wrote a cold, emotionally detached, haughty, difficult, prickly, private, uncommunicative, out-of-touch bigot. But people adore her, because they think it was written with compassion and integrity rather than being a hatchet job." David Frost speaks warmly of Morgan, and Morgan himself says the only complaint he's heard from Gordon Brown about The Deal is that as portrayed by David Morrissey he looked "too fat" on screen.

"I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about," Morgan continues. "And I quite like writing about people who are vilified. It gives them a fighting chance, I suppose. It interests me to represent people who are hated, although in the case of Nixon and Amin that [hatred] is entirely justified."

He sees in many of these characters a self-destructive streak, and although he often deals with paradigm shifts in British culture - Diana's death, the death of socialism under New Labour - he insists he writes most of his scripts as "pas de deux".

The Deal, he says, was about friendship and betrayal, The Queen about an elderly, out-of-touch woman threatened by her ersatz son, in the shape of the Prime Minister, and Frost/Nixon about "two lonely, disconnected men clamouring for the limelight to complete themselves somehow". He says he is more comfortable writing about personalities diametrically opposed to his own, but there may be another reason why so much of his work is set in the early Seventies.

Peter Morgan's father was Arthur Morgenthau, a German Jewish businessman who fled the Nazis, married a Catholic Polish wife who had fled from Stalin, and settled to raise Peter and his younger sister in Wimbledon. He died when Peter was nine.

"It is devastating, losing a parent," he says. "I don't really know what the effect is, but I suppose people might call me an ambitious man, and I'd say that an ambitious man is a damaged man. Some of the things I have written about are a way of connecting with my father - I know he knew who Idi Amin was, and I know he knew who Longford was. And I know he knew who Nixon was, because shortly before he died I talked to him about Watergate."

Morgan is loath to poke about too much in his own psyche, to " overthink my thinking". "I spend my time trying to get away from myself. I can't even look at myself in the mirror. I don't know why." He gives me a hard stare. "But I wouldn't talk about my private life with a stranger even if I was drunk, and anyway, I don't want to know what swamp of toxicity and lunacy lies beneath the surface."

After her husband's death, Morgan's mother was reluctant to sell the marital home, because "moving would have meant letting go of him, in a way". So she took in lodgers, and with the help of one of Arthur Morgenthau's relatives, sent her son to St Paul's, where he was happy, and to Downside, where being bilingual, he was called Fritz.

"Why would anybody be happy there?" he snorts. "It's just insane sending young men to a monastery in the middle of Somerset. I still feel more comfortable in a Jewish metropolitan mileu than in one that is all country and English and smart."

Nevertheless, he got into acting at Downside, and then at Leeds University, until a bout of crippling stage fright while playing the King in Love's Labour's Lost turned him towards writing and directing. With a friend, Mark Wadlow, he took a play called Gross to the Edinburgh Festival.

One night a member of the audience came backstage and asked them if they wanted to write training films, which they did immediately after university. This in turn led to sporadic work polishing Hollywood scripts for little money, which in the past Morgan has described as the rankest exploitation.

"Yes, but who's exploiting whom?" he says. "I was 23, just out of university, and I was rewriting Madame Sousatzka for John Schlesinger. I couldn't believe my luck." The script-polishing jobs came around about once a year, but Morgan thinks that writing training films throughout his twenties enabled him to "write out the bad stuff: it takes 10 years to learn scriptwriting like any other trade".

He and Wadlow (now a senior writer on Coronation Street) parted company amicably after rewriting the awful John Goodman-comedy King Ralph, when Morgan realised he wanted to work alone on "a very autobiographical script called Shalom Joan Collins". This became his first TV commission in 1989. Others followed: Micky Love, Metropolis, The Jury, and the Emmy-winning Henry VIII with Ray Winstone, which came out in 2003, along with The Deal.

Today, Morgan lives in Battersea with his Austrian wife, Lila, and their daughter and three sons, the eldest of whom is seven, the youngest nine months.

"Every time it settles down we seem to have another baby," Morgan says. He's been popping down to Elstree to watch Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman filming his adaptation of Philippa Gregory's historical romance The Other Boleyn Girl. He has another film planned with Stephen Frears, about football manager Brian Clough, but after that he's finished with real people for a while.

"I'm gagging to write some fiction," he says. "I don't know what it will be but I think it might be a spiritual love story, very emotional, a proper weepie." Are you happy, I ask Peter Morgan? Contented? "I think I'm ... complicated," he says. "But what a relief. I like complicated people."

The Queen is in cinemas now; Frost/Nixon transfers to the Gielgud (0870 890 1105) on 10 November; Longford is repeated on Monday on More4 at 9pm and 11.55pm; The Last King of Scotland will be released on 12 January, and The Other Boleyn Girl is also due for release in the New Year.

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