Robert Bolt was 36 when A Man For All Seasons earned him the accolade "most promising playwright of his generation" - a prediction he never fulfilled, thanks to the siren call of Hollywood. It might be argued, however, that in writing for the cinema Bolt found his metier. Of the seven screenplays he wrote, two are among the most popular films of all time: Lawrence Of Arabia and Dr Zhivago.
A good film, Bolt once said, needed "a strong narrative plus a bit of freewheeling magic", criteria amply fulfilled by his own life: an ultimately tragic mix of public success mirrored by a private tragedy, a storyline littered with victims of his Faustian ambition. But he paid the price. At the age of 55, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood had a heart attack swiftly followed by a stroke which left him paralysed and unable to communicate in any way. Robert Bolt was born in Cheshire in 1924. His father was a shopkeeper. Although academically erratic compared with his elder brother Sydney, Bolt somehow survived university and the tail end of the war. Having no other ambitions, he trained as a teacher: in tune with his socialist principles, he took a grassroots job in a village primary school. Life was hard, particularly with a young wife, Jo, and baby in tow. But then came his Pauline revelation. Asked to produce the school nativity play, the scripts, he discovered, were either "either unspeakably dull or unspeakably mawkish". So he decided to write his own.
"Literally within about five lines of dialogue the penny dropped and I thought, this is what I want to do." Next stop was Millfield school, at the time the most expensive and unconventional boarding school in England. By day Bolt taught English and sailing to the sons and daughters of the very rich; by night he wrote radio plays in the bedroom of a thatched cottage, picturesque but excessively primitive, with no heating and no running water. In the garden were the privy and the well. Somehow, two more children were fitted in.
This bucolic existence continued until 1959 when, with two hit plays running in London, the day-job and the rural Arcadia that went with it had to go. Bolt's second wife, Sarah Miles, is often seen as the root of his downfall. But the rot set in long before, in the guise of David Lean and Sam Spiegel. Unhappy with the script for their film about T. E. Lawrence, based on his autobiographical Seven Pillars Of Wisdom, Spiegel was looking for a quick-fix writer. Bolt's original misgivings about the validity of the cinema ("an inferior medium" he said at the time) were silenced by Spiegel's cheque for £7,000 for seven weeks' work.
It should have ended there, but Lean was so impressed by Bolt's dialogue he insisted Bolt be hired to re-write the whole screenplay. As Adrian Taylor writes in his biography Scenes From Two Lives: "It was a defining moment in Robert's career: he had walked unwittingly into a whirlpool of love, hate and clashing egos." Not to mention vast sums of money for the young man who only six months before was drawing water from a well every morning before he went to work.
A half-written play was abandoned. Frith Bunbury, its intended director, was devastated: "I thought he was going to be a really important dramatist but he preferred Sam Spiegel's yacht." Peter Hall, then transforming the Royal Shakespeare Company into a real force in English theatre, was equally distressed. He and Bolt were friends and it was through Hall that Bolt had met Peter O'Toole, who at his suggestion was cast as Lawrence, breaking his contract with the RSC. "What's interesting about Bob is not so much what he wrote but that he was a product of his times," says Hall. "He was a working-class boy who made good and was destroyed by market forces. He loved money, much more than I did. I mean, he really loved it. It was a measure of his status." In Robert Bolt, David Lean had found the intellectual edge he himself lacked. In Lean, Bolt had found the perfect teacher for the new medium.
While Lean kept his eye on the adventure story, Robert Bolt gave him detail, dialogue and symbolism. For Bolt, Lawrence Of Arabia was a baptism of fire: "A continuous clash of egomaniacal monsters, wasting more energy than the dinosaurs and pouring rivers of money into the sand." Half way through shooting, in memory of his socialist principles, he joined other high-profile CND marchers at a mass rally in Trafalgar Square, was duly arrested and sentenced to a month's imprisonment.
However, Spiegel's wrath at losing his screenwriter forced Bolt to recant and he was collected from Drake Hall open prison in Spiegel's Rolls Royce. For the moralising author of A Man For All Seasons, it was "the most shameful moment of my life". Life for his little family had became impossible. When Bolt wasn't on location he was locked away in his study writing, or strutting the media stage. Jo found his compulsion to be rich and famous increasingly hard to take: she was shattered by the way he had compromised principles they had shared since they had first met at Manchester University. To save the marriage, the couple moved out of London, to the Hampshire coast where Bolt could indulge his love of boats. But the carpenter Jo employed to renovate the house proved a better companion than her husband.
When Bolt joined David Lean in Venice to begin work on Dr Zhivago (Lean was by this time a tax exile) the nails were already in the marital coffin. The success of Zhivago sprang, once again, from the seamless fusion of its disparate themes. For Lean it was always a love story. For Bolt the crux was the Russian revolution. The task of transforming Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel, with its multiplicity of interconnected stories, into a linear two-hour movie he described as like "straightening cobwebs".
He met Sarah Miles at a dinner party a year after Jo walked out of the marriage. It had lasted 20 years.
Now he was 41 and Sarah was 24, already a star. (He had dismissed her as a possible Lara in Zhivago, on the basis of her role in The Servant - "a northern slut".) For both of them it was fascination at first sight.
Bolt was understandably nervous. He was sexually very inexperienced, she was not. (Unknown to anyone, she was still involved in her four-year affair with Lawrence Olivier.) However, a year later they were living together and when they found she was pregnant, they married.
Bolt was besotted and scoured history and literature for women whose characters reflected Sarah's. First came a play, Vivat Vivat Regina; then Ryan's Daughter, a re-working of Madame Bovary; then Lady Caroline Lamb, his first and only attempt at directing, an experience that left him drained. "It's no wonder so many films have such tenuous and quirky connections with life. Film directors are surrounded by an invisible field of vibrating resentment and self-pity which makes it impossible for life to approach."
It was while Sarah was in Los Angeles, having been nominated for an Oscar for Ryan's Daughter, that she first met David Whiting, an American journalist. They slept together. But for Whiting this was just a taster. He followed her to England and somehow infiltrated his way into the Bolt household as her publicity manager. He unnerved everybody with his obsession, but nobody knew what to do.
Then, while on location with The Hireling in Arizona in 1973, David Whiting was found dead in Sarah Miles's bathroom. The official verdict was suicide, but rumours that Sarah inflicted a blow to his head that killed him persisted. Her career in America was finished. As was her marriage. Bolt continued to work, but the fire had gone out. Relationships with women were a disaster. The day before his heart attack in LA in 1979 he met up again with Sarah. They took a walk on a beach. Perhaps they could work something out.
Much has been made of their remarriage and of Sarah's unstinting care of Bolt in his last, stroke-disabled years. But in fact, it was some time before she reappeared. (When asked if her return was proof that she really loved him, Bolt replied "No. I think it's a new role for her to play.") The harrowing task of getting Bolt to walk, talk, work and write again was that of the children of his first marriage and a family friend, Ann Queensbury, who he subsequently married (though that lasted only until he was back on his feet again and Sarah returned).
Bolt never learnt to speak properly again, but with the help of a word-processor and computer, he was able to get back in the game through by his wits and his words.
Although television dominated his output, his last feature film, The Mission, was completed in 1986. Bolt re-married Sarah Miles in 1988 and until his death in 1995 lived quietly in the country where, encouraged by Bolt, Sarah began to write herself.
But his family continued to be dogged by tragedy. His neglected firstborn, Sally, committed suicide. Tom, his son by Sarah, was a heroin addict at the age of 17, but somehow survived. His daughter Jo Jo suffers from ME. His son Ben is a successful TV drama producer but it is the son of Bolt's clever brother Sydney, the playwright and translator Ranjit Bolt, who has inherited the mantle of family wordsmith.