Hampton, Christopher

Hampton, Christopher (1946- ), British playwright and scriptwriter. Born in the Azores, as a child Hampton travelled around Aden, Egypt, and Zanzibar. In 1966 he went to Oxford University to study German and French. He wrote his first play, When Did You Last See Your Mother?, at the age of 18. It was first performed by Oxford undergraduates and moved in 1966 to the Royal Court, London, where he was appointed as the theatre's first resident dramatist. Since then, Hampton, a consummate technician, has worked on numerous original plays, adaptations, and translations in the theatre, television, and cinema. Thematically, he has shown an interest in power relations, including colonialism and sexual intrigue in particular. His early plays, produced at the Royal Court, include Total Eclipse (1968), The Philanthropist (1970), Treats (1976), and Tales from Hollywood (1982). His most commercial success has been his stage adaptation of the 18th-century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, a study of seduction and sexual manners, which he later adapted into an even more successful film. Other adaptations for film by Hampton include: A Doll's House (1973); Tales from the Vienna Woods (1979); The Honorary Consul (1984), by Graham Greene; his own play Total Eclipse (1995); Mary Reilly (1996); and The Quiet American (2002), also by Greene. His works for television include adaptations of the Malcolm Bradbury novel The History Man (1981), and Hôtel du Lac (1986) from the novel by Anita Brookner. His stage play White Chameleon (1991) is about his life as a young boy in Egypt. In 1995 Hampton made his directorial debut with the film Carrington, about Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey, starring Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce. He later wrote and directed a film version of The Secret Agent (1996) by Joseph Conrad as well as Imagining Argentina (2003), which was based on Lawrence Thornton’s novel about a playwright who experiences unsettling supernatural visions of the fates of victims of the terror campaign by Argentina’s ruling military junta in the 1970s. Hampton was made a CBE in 1999.