Movies - Nigel Kneale

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Nigel Kneale (born Thomas Nigel Kneale on April 18, 1922 in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, England, UK) is a Manx television and film scriptwriter, who has worked mostly in the UK. He is best known for his creation of the character of Professor Bernard Quatermass, who has appeared in three serials for BBC Television, one for Thames Television and three feature film adaptations of the BBC serials for the Hammer company.

Early life and career

Although born in England, Kneale's family were from the Isle of Man and returned there shortly afterwards, where he was brought up in the capital, Douglas. His father was the editor of the local newspaper, and his brother Bryan is a renowned sculptor. Kneale enjoyed life on the island, but a skin condition meant that the weather there did not suit him and in 1947 he left for mainland Britain.

After initially pursuing a career as an actor, Kneale decided to switch to writing after "a season carrying spears at Stratford-upon-Avon" convinced him he would never make it very far as a performer. He began working in prose, in 1950 winning the Somerset Maugham Award for his collection of short stories, Tomato Cain.

He had first moved into broadcasting when he began writing plays for BBC Radio in 1948, subsequently concentrating on script work and becoming one of the first permanent staff drama writers for BBC Television. His first television work, on the play Arrow to the Heart, was broadcast in July 1952. He quickly forged a reputation as one of the premier scriptwriters of BBC Television, and in 1953 teamed up with noted television director Rudolph Cartier - who had written Arrow to the Heart before Kneale had been brought in to polish up the script - to create the legendary science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment
.

1950s and Quatermass

Lasting for six weeks over July and August, The Quatermass Experiment tells the story of Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group, and the consequences of him sending the first manned mission into space when a terrible fate befalls the crew and only one returns. It was a huge popular and critical success, and Cartier and Kneale became the No. 1 team of BBC drama.

They worked on literary adaptations of Wuthering Heights
and most famously Nineteen Eighty-Four together, in the latter case creating a television production which became almost as famous as the book itself, being labelled both horrific and subversive, provoking death threats and raising questions in Parliament.

A second Quatermass serial, Quatermass II
, arrived in 1955, the same year in which Hammer released their adaptation of the Professor's first outing, The Quatermass Xperiment
, the spelling changed to play on the film's X-certificate for its horrific content. Kneale was displeased with the adaptation, however, on which he had been able to do no work as his BBC staff contract prohibited it.

However, soon after this he left the BBC, and was thus able to pen the screen plays of both the Hammer adaptation, Quatermass 2
, and their version of another of his BBC collaborations with Cartier, The Creature, filmed as The Abominable Snowman.

Despite no longer being on the staff of the BBC he still wrote for them, in 1958 penning what many believe to be the greatest of all the Quatermass serials, Quatermass and the Pit
. A sophisticated tale of racial tension, the origins of mankind and primaeval fears, it drew much critical acclaim and a huge audience for the time, allegedly emptying the pubs on the night of its final episode. There was no way Kneale could top that, and it proved to be the character's last BBC television outing, although Hammer did produce another film adaptation of Quatermass and the Pit, again with Kneale adapting his own script, in 1967.

Later film and television career

As well as having adapted his own serials for the screen, Kneale also forged a successful screenwriting career adapting other peoples' work for the cinema. He wrote the screenplays for successful film adaptations of Look Back in Anger
(1958), The Entertainer
(1960) and The First Men in the Moon (1964). Later on in his career he provided the original screenplay for the horror film Halloween III: Season of the Witch
(1982), although he was so displeased with all of the changes that were made to it that he had his name removed from the credits of the final cut. In the same decade, he collaborated with John Landis on the script for a planned re-make of the 1950s film Creature from the Black Lagoon
, but this was never eventually produced.

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