Keith Spencer Waterhouse CBE (6 February 1929 4 September
2009) was a
novelist,
newspaper columnist, and the writer of many
television series.
Biography
Keith
Waterhouse was born in Leeds
, West Yorkshire, England
. He
did two years of
national service
in the
Royal Air Force.
His credits, many with life-long friend and collaborator
Willis Hall, include
satires such as
That Was The Week That Was,
BBC-3 and
The Frost Report during the 1960s, the
book for the 1975 musical
The
Card,
Budgie,
Worzel Gummidge, and
Andy Capp (an
adaptation of the
comic strip).
His 1959 book
Billy Liar was
subsequently filmed by
John
Schlesinger with
Tom Courtenay in
the part of Billy. It was nominated in six categories of the 1964
BAFTA awards, including Best Screenplay, and
was nominated for the Golden Lion at the
Venice Film Festival in 1963; in the
early 1970s a
sitcom based on the character
was quite popular and ran to 25 episodes—a respectable run for a
British sitcom, although it has seldom been seen since.
Waterhouse's first screenplay was the film
Whistle Down the Wind
(1961). Without receiving screen credit, Waterhouse and Hall did
extensive rewrites on the original script for
Alfred Hitchcock's
Torn Curtain (1966).
Waterhouse is also the
author of the play Jeffrey
Bernard is Unwell (1989; Old Vic
premiere,
1999), based on the life of journalist
Jeffrey Bernard.
His career began at the
Yorkshire Evening Post and he
also wrote regularly for
Punch, the
Daily Mirror, and for the
Daily Mail. His extended style book for the
Daily Mirror,
Waterhouse On Newspaper Style, is
regarded as a classic textbook for modern journalism. This was
followed by a pocket book on English usage intended for a wider
audience entitled
English Our English (And How To Sing
It).
He fought long crusades to highlight what he perceived to be a
decline in the standards of modern English; for example, he founded
the Association for the Abolition of the
Aberrant Apostrophe, whose members
attempt to stem the tide of such solecisms as "pound's of apple's
and orange's" in greengrocers' shops.
In February 2004 he was voted Britain's most admired contemporary
columnist by the British Journalism
Review.
On 4 September 2009, a statement released by his family announced
that Waterhouse had died quietly in his sleep at his home in
London; he was 80.
Works
References
External links
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