Alan Sharp

Alan Sharp (12 January 1934 – 8 February 2013) was a Scottish novelist and screenwriter. He published two novels in the 1960s, and subsequently wrote the screenplays for about twenty films, mostly produced in the United States.

According to one obituary, "his best-known narratives created and then disassembled audience expectations about all the usual Hollywood verities, especially the triumph of justice, love and friendship."

When he left the army he returned to Greenock, got married and intended to train as a teacher. However, when his college grant arrived, he gave the money to his wife and left for Germany. He then relocated to London with the intention of becoming a writer. was left incomplete when Sharp emigrated to Hollywood and focused on screenwriting.

Sharp married for a second time and also had a relationship with the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, with whom he had a daughter, Ruth. Bainbridge later said, "He showed up for Rudi's birth, but then went downstairs saying he was going to get a book out of the car and never came back."

Screenwriting When Sharp moved to Hollywood, he said he was interested in writing detective and Western films. "They satisfied some requirements of detachment from personal content and yet allowed me to write about themes that interested me," he said.

He wrote The Last Run, which he called "an attempt to use the melodramatic crime chase to deal with whatever the hero's preoccupations might be." His feature film projects included The Osterman Weekend (Sam Peckinpah's swan song in 1982), Rob Roy (1995), and Dean Spanley (2008).

He lived for a number of years in New Zealand on Kawau Island, but moved back to Scotland in 2000. In 1996, Peter Broughan announced that he and Sharp would be making two further feature films together, Vain Glory about Christopher Marlowe and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; neither was made, nor was a film Sharp wrote about Scottish poet Robert Burns.

A second daughter, Rachel Minnie Sharp, also briefly an actress, was married to Luke Perry.

Sharp was survived by his fourth wife, Harriet Sharp, and a total of six children, two stepsons and 14 grandchildren, including professional wrestler Jack Perry.

In the 1970s, six of Sharp's screenplays became high-profile Hollywood feature films, most of them dealing with quintessentially American themes and characters. Walter Chaw writes of Sharp's screenplays from this period, "On the strength of his scripts for The Hired Hand, Ulzana's Raid, and Night Moves, Scottish novelist Alan Sharp seems well at home with the better-known, more highly regarded writers and directors of the New American Cinema. Sharp's screenplays are marked by a narrative complexity and situations gravid with implication and doom."

Trevor Johnston has written that "There's an argument to suggest that a certain seventysomething Scot could well be Britain's greatest living screenwriter. Much is made of pre-Star Wars '70s Hollywood as a kind of celluloid golden age, and Alan Sharp was there in the thick of it, working with the very best, generating the sort of track record few British screenwriters are likely to match."

David N. Meyer has incorporated an appreciation of Sharp's writing in his review of Night Moves (directed by Arthur Penn in 1975). Following a description of an important seduction scene from the film, Meyer adds: "These delicious, poisonous moments – these cookies full of arsenic – come courtesy of Alan Sharp's venomous, entrapping, perfectly circular screenplay. It's hard not to regard him – rather than Penn – as the engine of Night Moves''' enduring power. Sharp had an unbroken forty year career writing features and television."

Quentin Curtis called the screenplay for Rob Roy "one of the best screenplays in the last decade".

Archives

Following Sharp's death, his friend Brian Cox requested that his widow Harriet gather his papers together. She herself died before these could be collected in New Zealand, but Sharp's papers are now held by Archive Services at the University of Dundee. The collection includes original screenplays, unpublished works and personal and professional correspondence.

Selected creditsFirst Night – episode "Funny Noises with Their Mouths" (1963) – writer – starred Michael Caine, Ian McShane The Wednesday Play – episode "A Knight in Tarnished Armour" (1965) – writerDouble Image – episode "Home and Away" (1966) – writerITV Playhouse – episode "A Sound from the Sea" (1970) – writerPlay for Today – episode "The Long Distance Piano Player" (1970) – writerThe Last Run (1971) – writerThe Hired Hand (1971) – writerUlzana's Raid (1972) – writer, associate producerBilly Two Hats (1974) – writerNight Moves (1975) – writerDamnation Alley (1977) – writerComing Out of the Ice (1982) – writerThe Year of Living Dangerously (1982) – writer (uncredited)The Osterman Weekend (1983) – writerLittle Treasure (1985) – writer, directorThe Edge (1989) – writerLove and Lies (1990) – writerDescending Angel (1990) – writerMission of the Shark: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis (1991) – writerThe Last Hit (1993) – writerBetrayed by Love (1994) – writerRob Roy (1995) – writerLittle Girl Fly Away (1998) – writerLathe of Heaven (2002) – writerReversible Errors (2004) – writerWhile I Was Gone (2004) – writerAvenger (2006) – writerNightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King – episode "The Fifth Quarter" (2006)My Talks with Dean Spanley (2008) – writer, executive producerBen Hur (2010) – writer