Biography

When he was in college, his girlfriend left him for a man named Bernard. In each of his screenplays, there is a fairly unpopular character named Bernard.

Founded Comic Relief with Lenny Henry.

As a child, he lived in New Zealand, the Philippines, and Sweden because his father was an executive of Unilever who was posted around the world.

Ranked #12 in the 2008 Telegraph's list "the 100 most powerful people in British culture".

Together with Ben Elton, he was offered the chance to write "Police Academy 6: The London Beat", but refused.

You won't find many people who've had an easier ride in movies than I.

I didn't decide to be a writer. I wanted to be an actor and I turned out to be very bland, so I would always get cast as a character from Twelefth Night called Fabian, who hides behind the hedge and doesn't have any funny lines. So I decided I would have to write my own lines.

Anything that is wrong with a film will come back to haunt you forever, so I take a long time writing, fix everything, underline bits that I thought were funny when I first thought of them because they won't be funny when I look at them later. Oh, and I put the word 'fuck' in a lot.

Never, ever in any of our films have we thought 'we'll do this for the American market', Sometimes we'd change a song or a name or the word 'arse' but on the whole we try to make movies for home and then just hope they'll work in the US.

I think I had a very lucky break when we asked Mike Newell to do Four Weddings. Mike is a very serious, beautiful person, a wonderful director. What he succeeded in doing was to hide the fact that the original script read much more like a series of sketches.