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Famous Like Me > Writer > C > James Clavell

Profile of James Clavell on Famous Like Me

 
Name: James Clavell  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 10th October 1924
   
Place of Birth: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
   
Profession: Writer
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
James Clavell in 1986

James Clavell (Charles Edmund DuMaresq de Clavelle) (October 10, 1924 – September 7, 1994) was a novelist and screenwriter, famous for books such as Shogun and films such as The Great Escape and To Sir, with Love.

Personal life

Clavell was born in Sydney, Australia in 1924. His father was an officer in the Royal Navy, so Clavell was raised in many different places within the British Commonwealth. In 1940 he joined the British Royal Artillery and was sent to Malaysia to fight the Japanese. Wounded by machine gun fire, he was eventually captured and sent to a Japanese prisoner of war camp on Java. Later, he was transferred to Changi Prison near Singapore. His experiences there became the basis of his first novel, King Rat, published in 1962.

By 1946 Clavell had risen to the rank of Captain, but a motorcycle accident ended his military career. He enrolled at the University of Birmingham, where he met April Stride, an actress, who he married in 1951. Through her, Clavell was introduced to the movie industry, and developed a desire to be a director. He moved with his family to New York in 1953 where he worked in television, and soon thereafter to Hollywood. Eventually he earned success as a screenwriter with films such as The Fly and Watusi. He co-wrote the classic film The Great Escape, which firmly established his reputation in Hollywood. By 1959 he was producing and directing films of his own.

In 1963, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He died of a stroke following cancer in Switzerland in 1994.

"The Asian Saga"

After publishing King Rat in 1962, Clavell returned to novels with Tai-Pan in 1966. Set during the founding period of Hong Kong in the 1840s, Tai-Pan became the model for Clavell's later novels, which involve a large number of characters and numerous loosely interwoven plots. Shogun was published in 1975 and became his most popular book. With Noble House he began his practice of connecting these formally disparate novels together by having characters, or families, or descendents of families (some from as far back as 400 years) from the previous novels appearing in the plot of the current one. Both Shogun and Noble House were made into television miniseries. Whirlwind came next and was set during the Iranian revolution of 1979. For this novel he received the largest advance payment, at the time, for an unwritten work. Many critics (as they tend to do) leapt on this in their reviews and ignored the content of the story. Nevertheless it was not the big seller that the previous two novels had been and no television version or movie was produced. Gai-Jin was published shortly before his death and took the story back to the 1860's. One of the main connections in this saga (they are only missing from King Rat and Shogun) is the history of the Struans, a trading company, based on the actual company Jardine Matheson.

These novels, taken together, came to be officially known as The Asian Saga. The main theme tying these books together is the meeting of Western civilization and East Asian civilization after the Age of Discovery and up to modern times.

Clavell is sometimes called one of the first multiculturalists. Although he did not call himself a cultural relativist, he attempted to admire Asian cultures by their own standards rather than viewing them through a Western lens. He often implied that the West has a great deal to learn from the East.

His protagonists are Westerners (mainly Britons) brought to Asia for commercial purposes. Clavell was a believer in the benefits of free trade between nations, seeing it not as a form of exploitation but as a means of bringing different cultures together by binding them together in common interest. Because of this, there is little anti-imperialism in Clavell's works.

It may be said that the real protagonists in Clavell's novels are not the characters, but the time and place; the characters are the canvas on which Clavell illustrates a culture.

Films

  • The Fly (1958) (writer)
  • Watusi (1959) (writer)
  • Five Gates to Hell (1959) (writer & director)
  • Walk Like a Dragon (1960) (writer & director)
  • The Great Escape (1963) (co-writer)
  • 633 Squadron (1964) (co-writer)
  • The Satan Bug (1965) (co-writer)
  • To Sir, with Love (1966) (writer & director)
  • The Sweet and the Bitter (1967) (writer & director)
  • Where's Jack (1968) (director)
  • The Last Valley (1970) (writer & director)
  • Shogun - miniseries (1980)
  • Noble House - miniseries (1988)

Tai-Pan and King Rat have both been adapted as feature films, however Clavell was not directly involved in their writing.

Novels

'The Asian Saga'

  • King Rat (1962): Set in Japanese POW camp, 1945.
  • Tai-Pan (1966): Set in Hong Kong, 1841.
  • Shogun (1975): Set in feudal Japan, 1600.
  • Noble House (1981): Set in Hong Kong, 1963.
  • Whirlwind (1986): Set in Iran, 1979.
  • Gai-Jin (1993): Set in Japan, 1862.

As of 2005, Whirlwind and Gai-Jin remain the only Clavell novels yet to be adapted as films or miniseries; although at various times media have reported that such productions are planned, to date nothing has emerged. Similarly, media reports that Tai-Pan is to be adapted as a miniseries have yet to come to pass.

Other books include:

  • The Children's Story (1980)
  • The Art of War a translation of Sun Tzu's famous book (1983)
  • Thrump-O-Moto (1986)
  • Escape (1994) - based upon Whirlwind but not considered part of the Asian Saga

External link

  • James Clavell at the Internet Movie Database

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article James Clavell