Hugh Whitemore Biography

British dramatist, born in Tunbridge Wells, educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He is the author of several stage plays, most of them involving real people or true stories. These include Stevie (1977), about the poet Stevie Smith; Pack of Lies (1983), based on the case of Helen and Peter Kroger, about the impact on an ordinary suburban family of the discovery that their neighbours and close friends and Soviet spies in whose exposure and arrest they are expected by the authorities to co-operate; Breaking the Code (1986), about Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked the secrets of the Germans' Enigma machine in the Second World War and committed suicide after he was brought to trial for homosexual practices; and The Best of Friends (1988), about the three-way friendships of a Benedictine nun, Dame Laurentia McLachlan, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Sir Sydney Cockerell, and the dramatist Bernard Shaw. It's Ralph (1991), about a visitor from the past who reminds a rich broadcaster of his lost values and rejected idealism, was a rare foray into dramatic invention. Whitemore has also written many original scripts and dramatizations for television, and the screenplay for the film 84 Charing Cross Road.