Trivia

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 132, pp. 150-155. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

Was nominated for Broadway's 1956 Tony Award for his adaptation of playwright Jean Giraudoux's Best Play nominee "Tiger at the Gates."

Awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1962.

The name "Fry" was his maternal grandmother's maiden name.

Father of Tam Fry.

He was a noted expert on the lives and works of the Bronte sisters and wrote an original film script about their lives at the start of the 1970s. Richard Fleischer wanted to direct it and Glenda Jackson, Mia Farrow and Hayley Mills were mentioned as potential stars. But funding proved difficult to find, and Fry's script was very long - Fleischer estimated the film would run at least four hours. Fry was disinclined to cut the script in half, and the film was not made. However, some years later, Fry rearranged it into the basis for a four-part TV mini-series.

After attending Bedford Modern School, where he wrote amateur plays, he became a schoolteacher, working at the Bedford Froebel Kindergarten and Hazelwood School in Limpsfield, Surrey.

Christopher Fry is best known for his verse dramas, especially The Lady's Not for Burning, which made him a major force in theatre in the 1940s and 1950s.

In the 1920s, he met the writer Robert Gittings, who became a lifelong friend.

While still young, he took his mother's maiden name because, on very tenuous grounds, he believed her to be related to the 19th-century Quaker prison reformer Elizabeth Fry.He adopted Elizabeth Fry's faith, and became a Quaker.

The Dark is Light Enough, a winter play starring Katharine Cornell and Edith Evans in 1954, was third in a quartet of "seasonal" plays, featured incidental music written by Leonard Bernstein.[7] The production also featured Tyrone Power, Lorne Greene and Marian Winters. Christopher Plummer had an understudy role that he wrote about in his memoir. This play followed the springtime of The Lady's Not For Burning and the autumnal Venus Observed. The quartet was completed in 1970 with A Yard Of Sun, representing summer.

Beginning in the 1950s, many of Fry's plays were adapted for the screen, mainly television. A version of The Lady's Not For Burning was produced by Yorkshire Television, starring Kenneth Branagh, in 1987.

His professional career began to take off when he was commissioned by the vicar of Steyning, West Sussex, to write a play celebrating the local saint, Cuthman of Steyning, which became The Boy With A Cart in 1938. It would be put on professionally in 1950 with the young Richard Burton in his first starring role.

In 1986, he wrote One Thing More, a play about the 7th century Northumbrian monk Cædmon who was suddenly given the gift of composing song; The play was first broadcast on BBC radio, and then performed by the Next Stage Company directed by Joan White at Chelsea Old Church, November 1988, and at Whitby Abbey in Yorkshire, June 1989.

His play about Dr. Thomas John Barnardo, the founder of children's homes, toured in a fund-raising amateur production in 1935 and 1936, including Deborah Kerr in its cast.

As a curtain-raiser, he put on a revised version of a show he wrote when he was a schoolboy called The Peregrines. He also wrote the music for She Shall Have Music in 1935.

In commemoration of his achievements, Bedford Modern School named the new Junior School hall after him.

Despite working mainly for the cinema in the 1960s, he continued to write plays, including Curtmantle for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962, and A Yard of Sun - the fourth in his seasonal quartet - at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1970.

In 1948 he wrote a commission for the Canterbury Festival, Thor, With Angels.

In 1939 Fry also became artistic director of Oxford Playhouse.

A pacifist, he was a conscientious objector during World War II, and served in the Non-Combatant Corps; for part of the time he cleaned London's sewers.

Tewkesbury Abbey commissioned his play, The Tower, written in 1939, which was seen by the poet T. S. Eliot, who became a friend and is often cited as an influence.

Fry gave up his school career in 1932 to found the Tunbridge Wells Repertory Players, which he ran for three years, directing and starring in the English premiere of George Bernard Shaw's A Village Wooing in 1934.

He was also one of the writers of the film, Ben-Hur (1959), directed by William Wyler. But he was uncredited for his efforts on Ben Hur, as was Gore Vidal. The sole writing credit and Academy Award nomination instead went to Karl Tunberg. He collaborated on other screenplays including Barabbas (1961), which starred Anthony Quinn, and The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), directed by John Huston. Other screenplays include the documentary The Queen Is Crowned (1953).

Although Fry lived until 2005, his poetic style of drama began to fall out of fashion with the advent of the Angry Young Men of British theatre in the mid-1950s.

He was very unhappy to find several alterations being made to his screenplay for "Barabbas" during filming, and was initially very reluctant to work for the same producer, Dino De Laurentiis, on "The Bible".

According to Charlton Heston's biography, Fry wrote most of the script for Ben hur and was on the set if changes were needed. Karl Tunberg received sole writing credit, but Heston mentioned Fry's work on the script and publicly thanked Fry in his Academy Award acceptance speech, which angered the filmmakers. Tunberg was nominated, but his loss was one of Ben Hur's few.