Clive Exton

Clive Exton was born on April 11, 1930, and died on August 16, 2007. Clive Exton was a scriptwriter for television and cinema in the United Kingdom. He was born in the town of Clive. Jack Montague Brooks was born in Islington, London, England, the son of a civil servant. He was stationed in Germany while serving in the British Army for two years. He'd been married twice before. His first marriage was to Patricia Fletcher Ferguson (1951–1957), this relationship yielded two daughters (Ghislaine Frances Crerar Metcalfe and Sara Charlotte Montague-Brooks), and his second marriage was to Margaret "Mara" Reid from 1957 until his death. Clive Exton had three children with Margaret. Two of them were daughters named Antigone Margaret Exton White and Cornelia Plaxy Locatelli and a son named Saul Alexander. Because there was already an actor registered under the name Clive Brook, Equity, the actors' organization, ordered him to alter his professional name.

He took the name Exton from the character "Sir Piers Exton" in William Shakespeare's play Richard II after training at the Central School of Speech and Drama. In 1959, Granada Television broadcast his debut television play, No Fixed Abode. He next appeared in Sydney Newman's Armchair Theatre series, which includes episodes such as "Where I Live," "I'll Have You to Remember," "Hold My Hand, Soldier," and "The Trial of Doctor Fancy," among others, with the greatest of them directed by Ted Kotcheff. Later, he co-wrote "The Close Prisoner" for ATV's Studio 64 – a season of plays aimed to highlight the function of the writer in television – as well as The Bone Yard, Land of My Dreams, The Big Eat,The Rainbirds for the BBC and Are You Ready For The Music.

Clive Exton also co-wrote The Boundary (1975) for the BBC's experimental series The Eleventh Hour with Tom Stoppard Tom Stoppard, whose original name is Tom Straussle >> Read More... . He Adapted Graham Greene's short tales in 1975 and 1976 four of for Thames Television's Shades of Greene. The majority of this early work is now gone, having been created at a period when tape recordings were frequently deleted and tele recordings were abandoned. Exton did, however, write Stigma, a 1977 episode of BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas, and ITV Playhouse's 1979 version of M. R. James's Casting the Runes, both of which have survived. A ten-year tenure in Hollywood yielded little. Before returning to Britain, Clive Exton wrote The Awakening, out in 1980, which is somewhat an adaptation the Bram Stoker's novel in collaboration. He also wrote the action-adventure Red Sonja with Arnold in 1985. Exton died of brain cancer on August 16, 2007, in London.