Award-winning playwright and screenwriter Sir Ronald Harwood has died, aged 85, at home in Sussex

Born Ronald Horwitz in Cape Town, 1934, Harwood is best known for the stage shows and the screenplays of The Dresser (for which he was nominated for an Oscar) and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was also nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).

Harwood grew up in a traditional Jewish South African home, his Lithuanian father struggling to make a living and his mother resentful that she had to go out to work. His cousin is the other South African theatrical knight, Sir Antony Sher. He left South Africa aged 17 for London to try his luck in the in the theatre industry, changing his surname after an English master told him it was too foreign and too Jewish for a stage actor.

He was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and later joined Sir Donald Wolfit’s Shakespeare Company, where his experience as personal dresser of the ‘Grand Old Man’ eventually fuelled his most celebrated play The Dresser. Harwood went on to write 21 stage plays, 10 books and at least 16 credited screenplays, typically as an adapter.

His work contains a range of Jewish motifs and characters, from The Barber of Stamford Hill (a 1960 stage play, then adapted to TV, and expanded into a film in 1963) to The Pianist, Harwood’s film adaptation of the autobiography of Władysław Szpilman, a Polish Jewish musician who survived World War II in Warsaw. His play Collaboration is about the complex relationship between the German composer Richard Strauss and Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig.

Harwood's interest in the period of Nazi occupation in Europe and World War II also bore fruit in the 1975 film Operation Daybreak (or The Price of Freedom), the true story of the assassination of Nazi leader – and architect of the Final Solution – Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor (Governor) of Bohemia and Moravia, by the Czech Resistance in Prague (based on a book by Alan Burgess).

“I let the audience make up its mind," Harwood told the Jewish Chronicle in 2017, "I don’t lecture. My theory regarding theatre is that it should be entertaining and if it has any strong moral purpose, it should be concealed. No preaching!"

His wife Natasha died in 2013 and Sir Harwood is survived by their children Antony, Deborah and Alexandra.

By Judi Herman