Heralded as a playwright, screenwriter, and director, Sir David Hare has enjoyed a professional career that has stretched across more than 40 years. His time in the theater has been marked by several triumphs, including Plenty, The Blue Room, and Stuff Happens, and in 2011 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for his thought-provoking and politically engaging oeuvre. Hare’s transition to film began in earnest in the 1980s when he wrote and directed Wetherby (1985), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Paris by Night (1988), and Strapless (1989). But a growing dissatisfaction with his films inspired him to refocus on theater, where he wrote his celebrated trilogy of plays about British life—Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, and The Absence of War—in the early 1990s. Thankfully, Hare returned to screenplays with his terrific script for Louis Malle’s Damage (1992), a portrait of obsessive, doomed love based on Josephine Hart’s novel. More recently, he has received Academy Award nominations for his adapted screenplays for The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008), which won, respectively, Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet the Oscar for Best Actress. He also worked to adapt author Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, The Corrections, into a feature film. His plays Plenty and The Secret Rapture have been adapted into films, and in 2011 he wrote and directed the conspiracy thriller Page Eight, which starred Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz, and Michael Gambon.