Giles Cooper

Giles Stannus Cooper, OBE (9 August 1918 – 2 December 1966) was an Anglo-Irish playwright and prolific radio dramatist, writing over sixty scripts for BBC Radio and television. He was awarded the OBE in 1960 for "Services to Broadcasting". A dozen years after his death at only 48 the Giles Cooper Awards for Radio Drama were instituted in his honour, jointly by the BBC and the publishers Eyre Methuen.

Early life Giles Stannus Cooper was born into a landed Anglo-Irish family at Carrickmines near Dublin on 9 August 1918, the son of Guy Edward Cooper, a Royal Navy Commander, and nephew of politician and writer Bryan Ricco Cooper.

Writing Cooper was a pioneer in writing for the broadcast media, becoming prolific in both radio and television drama. His early successes included radio dramatisations of Dickens' Oliver Twist, William Golding's Lord of the Flies and John Wyndham's science fiction novel The Day of the Triffids. Wyndham wrote to Cooper congratulating him after the first broadcast. On television he was one of the main scriptwriters for the BBC's Maigret series of detective adaptations starring Rupert Davies in 52 episodes, for his work on which Cooper won the Guild of Television Producers' Script Award in 1961. He also adapted four Sherlock Holmes stories, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1965), Les Misérables, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Evelyn Waugh's trilogy of novels Sword of Honour (1967) for Theatre 625. the first and only American production, starring Martyn Green, was syndicated to public stations in 1981 by the National Radio Theater of Chicago. Also of note are Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1958) in which a young teacher finds his predecessor has been murdered by the boys in his class and The Long House (1965). Out of the Crocodile ran at the Phoenix Theatre in 1963-64 starring Kenneth More, Celia Johnson and Cyril Raymond. The Spies are Singing was presented at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1966, starring the theatre's Artistic Director John Neville. A post-mortem showed he had consumed the equivalent of half a bottle of whisky and the coroner at Kingston in January 1967 returned a verdict of misadventure. There have been several attempts to attribute his death to suicide, in particularly by The Stage newspaper. When interviewed by Humphrey Carpenter in 1995, BBC radio producer Douglas Cleverdon's widow, Nest, told him that she believed it was suicide. Cooper's family have always strongly disputed this, not only because it bears no relationship to the playwright's apparent frame of mind during the period leading up to his death, but also because it unfairly colours appraisal of his work from an academic standpoint.

Personal life and legacy In 1978 the Giles Cooper Awards for radio drama were established by the BBC in conjunction with the publishers Eyre Methuen, and continued to be awarded until the early 1990s.

Giles Cooper had two sons and four grandchildren, including actor Giles Cooper.