Profile of Richard Curtis on Famous Like Me

Richard Curtis (born November 8, 1956), a New Zealand-born British comedy scriptwriter, is best known for the TV series Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley and the movies Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. In 2003, he worked as a director for the first time on his own movie Love Actually.

Although he is not English, Curtis has lived in England since he was 11 and is a graduate of Oxford University (Christ Church). The son of an executive at Unilever, a multinational company specialising in food and personal care products, Curtis and his family lived in several different countries during his childhood, including Sweden and The Philippines. Part of the family still resides in Sydney, Australia.

Curtis was the co-writer with Philip Pope of the Hee Bee Gee Bees' single "Meaningless Songs" (B-side "Posing in the Moonlight") released in 1980 to parody the style of a series of Bee Gees disco hits. He then began to write comedy for film and TV.

He was a regular writer on the TV series Not the Nine O'Clock News, where he wrote many of the show's songs with Howard Goodall and many sketches, often with Rowan Atkinson.

Richard Curtis is married to script editor and broadcaster Emma Freud, with whom he has four children.

He is also the co-founder of the charity, Comic Relief. Every other year, for the past twenty years, Comic Relief has run Red Nose Day, a comedy telethon event on British television to raise money for charity.

In 2003, he was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy.

In much of his writing, there appears a character named Bernard; examples include the eponymous hero in Bernard and the Genie (1991), Nursy in Blackadder the Second, the second groom in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and a minor character in Bridget Jones's Diary. A "Bernie" appears in Notting Hill and Love Actually. Some press reports have stated, erroneously, that this tradition stems from Curtis' time at college, when his then-girlfriend left him for Bernard Jenkin (later a British MP). The Bernards are generally mild, mocking caricatures, or in the case of Nursy, female.

Campaigning

Curtis was a founder of both Comic Relief and Make Poverty History. He organised the Live 8 concerts with Bob Geldof to publicize poverty, particularly in Africa, and pressure G8 leaders to adopt his proposals for ending it. To date Comic Relief has raised £337 million for Africa and Britain.

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