Peter Morgan (born 10 April 1963) is an English screenwriter and playwright, best known for writing the films and plays The Deal, The Queen, and Frost/Nixon.
Peter Morgan was born in London, the son of refugees; his father Arthur Morgenthau was a German Jew who fled the Nazis, and his mother Inga, a Catholic Pole who fled the Soviets. He attended Mrs Henderson's Kindergarten in Wimbledon Village. He gained a degree in Fine Art from the University of Leeds and lived in Battersea, south London, with his Austrian wife Lila Schwarzenberg and their daughters and three sons. Peter Morgan and his family relocated to Vienna in the winter of 2006.
Morgan wrote television scripts throughout the 1990s, including an episode of Rik Mayal Presents... and the Comedy Premiere The Chest. He broke through with The Deal, a 2003 television drama about the power-sharing deal between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that was struck in the Granita restaurant in London. He received an Oscar nomination for The Deal's follow-up The Queen, a 2006 film starring Helen Mirren that showed the impact of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales on the British royal family. In 2007, he earned a Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press for his work on The Queen.
2006 also saw the release of The Last King of Scotland, the screenplay of which Morgan adapted with Jeremy Brock. They jointly won a BAFTA Film Award for their work in 2007. Also in 2006, Morgan's first play, Frost/Nixon, was staged at the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London. Starring Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella as Richard Nixon, the play concerns the series of televised interviews that the disgraced former president granted Frost in 1977 and that ended with a tacit admission of guilt regarding his role in the Watergate scandal. The play was directed by Michael Grandage and opened to enthusiastic reviews.
In May 2007, the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival honoured Morgan with th year's Kanbar Award for Excellence in Screenwriting. Variety announced in October 2007 that Morgan is working on a follow-up to The Queen. Michael Sheen will be reprising his role as Blair. The film will focus on Blair's relationship with U.S presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In 2008 he adapted John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy into a screenplay for Working Title Films.
