Peter Morgan

Peter Morgan (born in Wimbledon, London, in 1963) is a British playwright and screenwriter whose work spans theatre, film and television. He is best known for dramatising recent history and public life, and he has returned again and again to the British monarchy and the people who wielded power around it.

Morgan's father was a German Jew who had fled the Nazis and arrived in London in 1933; his mother was a Catholic Pole who had escaped the Soviets. Morgan was educated in London and later took a degree in Fine Art at the University of Leeds. His early work was mostly television writing in the 1990s, along with a romantic comedy. He broke through with The Deal (2003), a drama about the power-sharing arrangement between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and then with The Queen (2006), which examines how the death of Princess Diana affected Blair and the royal family. The film earned six Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe for its screenplay.

His stage success came with Frost/Nixon, which recreates the 1977 interviews in which David Frost questioned Richard Nixon and drew from him a tacit admission of responsibility for Watergate. The play moved to Broadway and won Tony Awards. Morgan's method is to rebuild real encounters between powerful people, letting tension grow out of dialogue and small gestures. Recurring preoccupations include persuasion, political ambition and the gap between a public figure and the private person, themes that also run through Rush (2013), about the rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, and The Audience (2013), about the weekly meetings between Elizabeth II and her prime ministers.

His most widely seen legacy is The Crown (2016-2023), the Netflix drama he created and wrote, which follows the reign of Elizabeth II. He has been nominated three times for Primetime Emmy Awards as an outstanding writer for the series, a sign of how far he has helped bring recent British history to a broad audience.