Peter Morgan (screenwriter)

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Peter Morgan (born April 10, 1963 in London) is an English Academy Award nominated screenwriter and playwright. He is best known for writing The Deal, a 2003 television drama about the power-sharing deal between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that was struck in the Granita restaurant in London; and for The Queen, a 2006 movie starring Helen Mirren that showed the impact of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales on the British royal family. It is for his work on this film that he received his Oscar nomination.

Also in 2006, Morgan's first play Frost/Nixon was staged at the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London. Starring Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella as Richard Nixon, the play concerns the series of televised interviews that the disgraced former president granted Frost in 1977 and that ended with a tacit admission of guilt regarding his role in the Watergate scandal. The play was directed by Michael Grandage and opened to enthusiastic reviews.

Morgan was born in London, the son of refugees; his father Arthur Morgenthau was a German Jew who fled the Nazis, and his mother Inga a Catholic Pole who fled the Soviets. He gained a degree in Fine Art from the University of Leeds and lived in Battersea, south London, with his Austrian wife Lila Schwarzenberg and their daughters and three sons. Peter Morgan and his family relocated to Vienna in the winter of 2006.

In January 2007, Morgan earned a Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press for his work on "The Queen." While during his acceptance speech, he called Queen Elizabeth II a "stubborn seventy year old woman" and wondered aloud what it would take for leaders to listen to their people when it concerns something of real importance. Following those remarks he was asked to "wrap up" his statement after less than one minute of speaking. Alec Baldwin was the following award recipient. His remarks lasted one minute, twenty-six seconds. He subsequently admitted that "As far as I am aware, I wrote about a cold, emotionally detached, haughty, difficult, prickly, private, uncommunicative, out-of-touch bigot".

In February 2007, Morgan won a BAFTA for his adapted screenplay to The Last King of Scotland, alongside fellow scribe Jeremy Brock.

On May 5, 2007, the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival will honor Peter Morgan with this year's Kanbar Award for Excellence in Screenwriting.

He attended Mrs. Henderson's Kindergarten in Wimbledon Village, along with actor Martin Clunes.