South African Playwright Athol Fugard’s Novel gets an Oscar
Nico on Mar 13 2006 at 11:04 am | Filed under: General Theatre
Well, it didn’t happen exactly like that. What happened was that his novel, Tsotsi, written back in the early 1960s, was picked up by South African director Gavin Hood and made into a movie, and that movie won the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film.
Fugard is the playwright whose works in the 1970s and 1980s brought the evils of apartheid in South Africa to the world stage, and is a giant in his own right.
Here’s the story that tells of his surprise at winning. Click quick, because those newspaper pages get edited fast!
An excerpt:
Though the South African film “Tsotsi,†adapted by director Gavin Hood from Fugard’s only novel, was nominated for best foreign language film, the writer himself was cozied up in the Rancho Santa Fe home of his friend Marianne McDonald watching a BBC detective drama.
Athol Fugard thought the manuscript for his only novel, “Tsotsi,” was lost; now its an Oscar-winning film.
“I must confess this terrible heresy,†he said, revealing that he neither attended the Kodak Theatre ceremony (though he was invited) nor watched it on television. The internationally acclaimed author of 33 plays – sprung from his native South Africa, saturated in its stark colors and spanning nearly 50 years of his own and his nation’s struggle – Fugard now lives most of each year in Del Mar.
“When I got the first phone call (from San Diego friend Jeannette Rigopoulos) to say it had actually won the Oscar. Oh my God, I couldn’t believe it,†Fugard said.
“Tsotsi†had its first screenings at international festivals where it picked up one major prize after another. At the Toronto Film Festival, it was the People’s Choice winner, an award that has been an accurate predictor of the best foreign film Academy Award.
(story got from The Elegant Variation, courtesy of Mark Savras)
