Andrew Davies

Andrew Davies (1936- ), writer and adapter of texts. He was born in Cardiff and studied at University College, London before following in his parents’ footsteps and becoming a schoolteacher and later a lecturer at Warwick University. He began writing professionally in the early 1960s. His subsequent output has been prolific, including drama for radio, television, and theatre, film screenplays, novels, and children’s books. A BAFTA and Emmy award-winner, he is known primarily for his skilful and often adventurous television adaptations of literary classics.

After writing a number of single television plays, children’s series, and an adaptation of R. F. Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days (1979), the success of Davies’ original series A Very Peculiar Practice (1986-1987), set in a university campus medical practice, enabled him to give up teaching and turn to writing full time. He then won great acclaim for his bold dramatizations of Michael Dobbs’ contemporary political novels House of Cards (1990) and To Play the King (1993), which revelled in the Machiavellian scheming of fictional politician Francis Urquhart, and prestige adaptations for the BBC of Middlemarch (1994) by George Eliot and Pride and Prejudice (1995) by Jane Austen. The latter captured the public imagination for its eroticization of the relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet and confirmed Davies as British television’s foremost writer of period dramas, a position he consolidated with further dramatizations of Austen’s Emma (1996), Moll Flanders (1996) by Daniel Defoe, Vanity Fair (1998) by William Makepeace Thackeray, Wives and Daughters (1999) by Elizabeth Gaskell, the 1950s comedy Take a Girl Like You (2000) by Kingsley Amis, Shakespeare's Othello (2001), and The Way We Live Now (2001) by Anthony Trollope. 2002 proved a particularly fruitful year for Davies, with the Sarah Waters lesbian romp Tipping the Velvet, the Boris Pasternak classic Doctor Zhivago, and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda all coming to the small screen via his hand. The television adaptations He Knew He Was Right (2004), from the Anthony Trollope novel, and Dickens's Bleak House (2005) were also scripted by Davies.

His other writing credits include the single dramas A Very Polish Practice (1992) and A Rather English Marriage (1998), and the films Circle of Friends (1995), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004).