Andrew Davies
Andrew Davies
Andrew Wynford Daviesis a Welsh writer of screenplays and novels, best known for House of Cards and A Very Peculiar Practice, and his adaptations of Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch and War & Peace. He was made a BAFTA Fellow in 2002...
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth20 September 1936
drama character stories
I'd love to adapt more contemporary novels. But there isn't really enough story and character to make a really satisfying serial, so they tend to be single dramas.
mother work-out trying
I had a mother who was very emotionally demanding, wanting to be the centre of attention. As they say in EastEnders, she thought it was all about 'er. I spent a lot of time trying to work out what was going on.
mistake emma should
I got quite cross when I heard about Emma Thompson adapting 'Sense and Sensibility.' It was absolutely childish of me, but I thought, 'I should be doing that. They didn't even ask me.' Some mistake, surely.
drama writing people
The joy of writing drama is putting yourself into different people's heads.
being-yourself people important
You're stuck with being yourself, so the important thing is to find people who like that.
two boots
When you see two writers named on a movie, one of them did some drafts and got the boot.
drama moving thinking
From time to time there is a move to do a little less in the way of period dramas, but people rebel. Audiences say we want them. There is a big hunger for them. I don't think it's sentimentality or nostalgia, it's often that they are simply the best stories.
jobs father writing
I had a very high opinion of my father's judgement of things and he said, "You better get a job that pays the bills because a writer doesn't make any money. If possible, get a job that allows you to write in your spare time."
fun america people
Rebecca Eaton has made an enormous contribution to the cultural life of America, and, more than that, she is one of the most fun people I know.
humour dickens
Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.
son adaptation dickens
An adaptation I was working on of Trollope's 'The Pallisers' has been axed by the BBC... I was also going to do Dickens' 'Dombey and Son' but they've asked me to do 'David Copperfield' instead.
teacher writing age
I was getting rewarded for writing well, from about the age of five or six. A teacher would say, "Look what Andrew has written," and I thought, "Maybe I could be a writer."
needs wonderful problem
The BBC fulfils a wonderful cultural function. Maybe the problem is that it feels it needs to be everything to everybody.
hands dirt lows
The writer in movies is about as low as you can get and you really are a hired hand. You are paid a lot of money to be treated like dirt.