John Hopkins (writer)
| John Hopkins | |
|---|---|
| Born |
John Richard Hopkins 27 January 1931 London, England, UK |
| Died | 23 July 1998 (aged 67) Woodland Hills, California, US |
| Nationality | British |
| Other names | John R. Hopkins |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Years active | 1957–1995 |
| Spouse(s) | Prudence Balchin (1954–69, div.) Shirley Knight (1969–1998) |
| Children | 1 |
John Richard Hopkins (sometimes credited as John R. Hopkins; 27 January 1931 – 23 July 1998) was a British film, stage, and television writer.
Born in southwest London, Hopkins was educated at Raynes Park County Grammar School, did National Service in the Army from 1950-1951 and read literature at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He began his career as a studio manager for BBC Television in the 1950s, before establishing himself as a writer beginning when his then father-in-law Nigel Balchin asked him to try his hand at adapting one of his novels, A Small Back Room, for television that appeared on the BBC Sunday Night Theatre in 1959. Hopkins then adapted Margery Allingham's novels about the private detective Albert Campion into two six-part serials, Dancers in Mourning (1959) and Death of a Ghost (1960). Hopkins followed with a series based on Rosamund Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets (1961). He wrote his own thriller series, A Chance of Thunder in 1961.
Hopkins was best known for the 1962 BBC popular police drama Z-Cars. Hopkins eventually wrote over ninety episodes of Z-Cars, one of which featured young actress Judi Dench in the role of a delinquent youngster. This character inspired Hopkins to write what is probably his best remembered work for the small screen, the four-part play sequence Talking to a Stranger (1966). Starring Dench and transmitted as part of BBC2's Theatre 625 anthology series, the plays told the story of one bleak weekend from the viewpoints of four members of the same family. Two Wednesday Plays from this period by Hopkins were Fable from January 1965 and Horror of Darkness broadcast the following March. The former imagines an inverted South African apartheid in Britain while the later is a rare exploration of homosexuality in the 1960s.
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