Hampton caught

Christopher Hampton creates worlds so beautiful you could hit pause during any one of his films and frame that image.

He puts his characters in French chateaux (Dangerous Liaisons) or Victorian mansions (Atonement) or Biarritz (Cheri). Today, Hampton has been put in what its website calls "the first and only AA four star Hotel in Hull". Four is maybe a little on the low side for him.

The first time he went to Hollywood he says: "I was shown up to my suite, all paid for by the studio, and I was absolutely exhausted. I looked around and couldn't see the bed anywhere. Where was the bed? Eventually I gave up and lay on a sofa. Just as I was starting to drift off to sleep, I noticed a spiral staircase over in one corner of the room. I went upstairs and there were three bedrooms. I was travelling alone.

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"The hotel stopped at 6pm every evening to serve the guests with caviar. Who lives like that?"

Hampton, 64, has been lauded as a great playwright for 46 years, his first success coming when he was an undergraduate. Born in the Azores, he had gone up to Oxford to study German and French and arrived there with his first play in his pocket. His tutor, a board member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, encouraged Hampton to enter the play into a university competition.

"I had no idea what you were supposed to do with a play. My tutor said the first thing I had to do was type it out, because I write everything on paper in longhand. I entered the play to the competition, it came third and I was very upset about that."

The two winning plays were too expensive to stage and the drama society asked to do his third-placed play because it featured fewer characters. Its author played the lead. "It was an enormous part to learn and I did it because I didn't think anyone else would be able to." Hampton received a glowing write up in a national newspaper and a producer at the Oxford Playhouse suggested he send the script to the legendary theatre agent Margaret Ramsay, known to all as "Peggy".

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"It was late spring and I had a ground floor room in the college. I was sitting at the window and one of the porters came rushing across the courtyard to tell me there was a phone call for me. I thought someone had died because they weren't supposed to run around fetching students for phonecalls.

"Peggy was on the phone and with the typical force of her character she had ordered the porter to come and fetch me. She said, 'I think you should come down to London so we can decide what to do with your play. Come tomorrow at 3pm'."

Hampton obeyed. "On that first occasion she picked up the phone and talked to Bill Gaskill at the Royal Court and said, 'There's a play here, I think it's very suitable for the Court'." Ramsay's influence spread farther and wider than any theatrical agent in the country and the play was on stage within months. Called When Did You Last See My Mother?, it was a hit and transferred soon afterwards to the West End.

Was Hampton aware how extraordinary it was? "I had no idea. There was a lot of publicity because I think I was the youngest person in modern times to have a play on in the West End and I ended up one day doing a lot of interviews. The producer assigned someone to go round with me and after about the third interview I told her I was bored of all this. She took me to one side and tore a strip off me. She said, 'You have no idea how lucky you are'. It was the first time I really thought about it."

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Today, Hampton is dressed all in black, his long silver hair a remarkable feature. He is at pains not to wear his intellect on his sleeve. It does, however, shine through in his writing. It was during his itinerant childhood that he first fell for the theatre. He was at the British Boys school in Alexandria when he saw a production of An Enemy of the People, the Ibsen play which he would go on to translate, his version is being staged at Sheffield's Crucible with Antony Sher in the leading role.

From his first play, Hampton had success after success, a major breakthrough coming with The Philanthropist when he was 23. A huge hit, it ran on Broadway in 1971 for two months, earned Hampton a Tony Award nomination and was revived with Matthew Broderick in New York last year.

With his stage plays such a success, Hampton faced a choice. "I think of myself as a playwright, but I've learnt to write films rather painfully over a period. I like variety. There are two very distinct sorts of writers: those who develop a style and a voice and stick to that and then there are people who like to jump all over the place. It was after The Philanthropist, my first big success, when Peggy said to me, 'You could write this play 40 more times or you can do something utterly different'." Throughout the Seventies he flitted between screen and stage with his writing, then in 1985 was commissioned by the RSC. "It was an open commission and so I decided to adapt Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. When I told them, they were not happy because they had done an adaptation in the Sixties which was an absolute disaster," says Hampton. Hampton's adaptation at the RSC in 1985, led in 1988 to the film version starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Keanu Reeves and Uma Thurman. Several minor miracles had to happen for the film to come into being.

The problems began before the project was even off the ground, when Oscar winning director Milos Forman (who had just finished Amadeus) announced he would be doing a version of the story, which scared off most film studios and many directors. It was eventually directed by Hampton's first choice Stephen Frears. When filming did get underway, within a week the production company went bust. Hampton eventually won an Oscar with it. "One way and another it was a bit of a bloody miracle. But I suppose everyone's allowed one."

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After the miracle, Hampton's star was riding high and he cashed it in to make "vanity" projects, stories that he had always wanted to tell. The self-directed Carrington, starring Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce was a critical success.

Hampton, however, is at pains to point out that other works of his have not been so well received.

"I've done a lot of work, but I have had my ups and downs. The last film I directed was roundly booed at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival (Imagining Argentina, 2003). You learn to take the rough with the smooth. Carrington (1995) won a couple of prizes at Cannes. To have your film premiering at Cannes in front of 3,000 people is terrifying. It's like a very, very slow car crash. Do you know what I mean?"

Of course, I don't know what he means. Few people do know at first hand what he means when it comes to winning Oscars and premieres at Cannes.

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"The night I won the Oscar is notorious in the history of the event for being a terrible evening. I had to sit there for three hours and the writers' awards were all at the end. That felt like a long evening. The last time, when I was nominated for Atonement, I sat next to Ronald Harwood. We were quite a few rows back and we saw the Coen brothers were quite close to the front. We turned to each other at the beginning of the evening and said, 'Well, we haven't won'. That was a nicer experience, we just sat there and enjoyed it."

Stories tumble out about working with Michelle Pfeiffer, Vanessa Redgrave (wonderful), Mildred Natwick (they got drunk in The Algonquin in New York while discussing her role in Dangerous Liaisons and he had to chase her down the street when she left, having forgotten to tell her she'd got the part) auditioning Keanu Reeves ("I said, 'You can't possibly cast this boy'") recent stars ("I'm writing something now for David Cronenberg and Keira's going to be in that").

Hampton never forgets that lesson learnt when he was a teenager with a West End hit and had "a strip torn off" by a producer's assistant.

"I'm still thrilled. The main pleasure is that these actors will turn up to do the pieces in the first place.

"You never get used to that."

Christopher Hampton was speaking in Hull at a Q&A session at the university's Philip Larkin Centre. His version of An Enemy of the People is at Sheffield Crucible to March 20.

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