Financial Times (London,England)

February 23, 1995, Thursday

Robert Bolt – Obituary

By STEPHEN AMIDON

Of all the great film writers, Robert Bolt, who died this week aged 70, seemed to understand best that he was writing for the big screen. He was particularly skilled at composing epic screen plays that could encompass large vistas and even larger characters. His was a truly vast imagination, whether it cast itself into the Arabian desert, the frozen steppes of Russia or the rugged Irish coastline.

Born in Sale in 1924, Bolt attended Exeter School and the University of Manchester before taking a job as a public school teacher to support himself while struggling as a playwright. Success came in 1960 with A Man For All Seasons, an articulate and highly dramatic account of the struggle between Sir Thomas More and Henry VIII.
The play won numerous prizes, including the coveted New York Drama Critics’ Award. It also brought him to the notice of David Lean, for whom Bolt became something of a house writer, penning Lean’s two great epics, Lawrence Of Arabia (1962) and Dr Zhivago (1965). The latter won Bolt an Academy Award, a feat repeated in the following year with his screen adaptation for Fred Zinnemann of A Man For All Seasons.
Bolt’s collaboration with Lean continued rather less successfully with Ryan’s Daughter (1970), where the duo’s penchant for gargantuan production values swamped both characters and story. Bolt turned director two years later with the disastrous costume epic Lady Caroline Lamb, an uninspired showpiece for his wife, Sarah Miles. That same year he was made a CBE.
Bolt’s career went into a decade of decline after that. In 1979 he suffered a severe stroke. However, after a near-miraculous recovery he wrote The Bounty (1984), which was intended to be a return to collaboration with David Lean but wound up being a rather stolid star vehicle for Mel Gibson, Anthony Hopkins and a host of topless Polynesian girls. This was followed in 1986 by another ambitious epic, The Mission, directed by Roland Joffe and starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons.
This tale of colonial conquest in 18th century Brazil was admirable for its intellectual and thematic sweep but seemed rather bloodless in comparison with Bolt’s work of two decades earlier.
At the time of his death, Bolt was living in semi-retirement with Sarah Miles, whom he had married for a second time.
Bolt was a writer who was always most comfortable dressing up profoundly serious ideas in sumptuous costumes. Moviegoers are fortunate that he came into maturity at a time when financiers were willing to pour money into sprawling, literate epics. His most memorable characters were men and women of conscience whose crises and affairs were continental in scale. It is hardly surprising that he was unable to maintain his great success in the nervier, anti-heroic era that followed Lawrence and Zhivago.