Peter Prince

Peter Alan Prince was born in Bromley, Kent, on 10 May 1942, the youngest of three children. His mother, Audrey (nee Kelley), was a secretary at the Ministry of Defence. His father, John Prince, was a war correspondent for The Times and later a medical journalist for the Daily Telegraph. According to The Observer, his father did not see "the little chap", as he called him in his diary, until Peter was 18 months old, and soon left again to cover D-Day.

He grew up in the suburbs of south London, a world his school friend Nigel Hinton described as grey and disciplined by day, while by night the young Peter was dazzled by Hollywood films and rock and roll. Many of his later fictional heroes carry the same sense of being out of place.

Prince won a place at Dulwich College as a scholarship boy under the "Dulwich experiment", which admitted pupils on academic ability alone with local authority funding. He did well academically but was unhappy there. He had planned to go to the London School of Economics until his mother spotted an advertisement for a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1961 he became one of the few undergraduate recipients of the Thouron Award. He majored in history at Penn, then took an MA in history at Columbia University. Returning to Britain in 1966, he began a PhD at Cambridge on the history of Sunday newspapers, particularly The Observer, but left before completing it.

After working as a subeditor on magazine partworks from 1969 and supervising an adventure playground in Battersea Park in the summer of 1970, Prince wrote his first novel, Play Things (1972). It won the Somerset Maugham Award and received warm reviews from writers including Nina Bawden and J. G. Farrell.

The novel's success led him into screenwriting. He adapted Play Things for BBC Playhouse (1976), directed by Stephen Frears and starring Jonathan Pryce and Nigel Hawthorne. With Frears he made the television films Early Struggles (1976), Last Summer (1977), a car-thief drama with Richard Beckinsale, and Cold Harbour (1978). He wrote The Floater (1975), a courtroom comedy for Play for Today, and the stage play Television Times (1980) for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

His landmark television work was Oppenheimer (1980), a seven-part BBC and WGBH Boston series produced by Peter Goodchild, with Sam Waterston as J. Robert Oppenheimer and David Suchet as Edward Teller. Prince and Goodchild researched in America for about a month, meeting Oppenheimer's colleagues and family. The series won three BAFTAs, including best drama series, and Prince was nominated for an Emmy for his writing.

In 1984 he wrote The Hit for Frears, a crime film starring Terence Stamp, John Hurt and Tim Roth. His 1983 novel The Good Father was filmed in 1985 by Mike Newell with Anthony Hopkins, Jim Broadbent and Harriet Walter. He adapted Graham Swift's Waterland for the 1992 film starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke. He kept writing fiction, including Death of a Soap Queen (1990), The Great Circle (1997), Waterloo Story (1999), Bubbles (2000) and Adam Runaway (2005).

Novels: Play Things (1972); Agents of a Foreign Power (1977); The Good Father (1983); Death of a Soap Queen (1990); The Great Circle (1997); Waterloo Story (1999); Bubbles (2000); Adam Runaway (2005).

Television: The Floater (Play for Today, 1975); Play Things (BBC Playhouse, 1976); Early Struggles (1976); Last Summer (1977); Cold Harbour (1978); Oppenheimer (1980, seven parts).

Stage: Television Times (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1980).

Film: The Hit (1984, screenplay); The Good Father (1985, from his novel); Waterland (1992, screenplay from Graham Swift's novel).

In his final years he worked on a much revised novel about Pache, a doctor in the Napoleonic army, which remains unpublished.

At the University of Pennsylvania Prince met a fellow student, Beth Freeman, and they married in 1965. They had a daughter, Rosa, who became a biographer and political commentator. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982. In 1987 he married Linda Romano. He was a lifelong admirer of America, a fan of American football and an enthusiast for the history of the American Civil War, visiting many of its battlefields. His school friend, the novelist Nigel Hinton, wrote that nobody could make him laugh as much as Peter could. He is survived by Linda, Rosa and his grandchildren, Ariel and JJ.

Prince's fiction is marked, in Nigel Hinton's words, by "a keen but non-judgmental eye for human foibles" and an unerring ear for dialogue. He found comedy in the everyday and had an instinctive sympathy for the underdog and the misfit. His heroes, often set in south London, tend to be diffident, insecure spectators of life who long to escape, like the narrator of Waterloo Story, known as Ghost, or Adam Hanaway of Adam Runaway. The Observer noted that his Oppenheimer was praised for presenting the arguments over the bomb as they were made at the time, rather than playing to a modern audience's views. Stephen Frears said he "liked to turn convention upside down."

Prince is remembered for Oppenheimer, which Michael Billington called in The New York Times "the ultimate account of the scientist dealing with matters of private conscience and public morality", and which was rediscovered in 2023 when the BBC put it on iPlayer after Christopher Nolan's film. The Hit has grown in reputation: Quentin Tarantino has named it a favourite, and Wes Anderson ranked it among the best British films. His collaborations with Stephen Frears helped shape the early career of one of Britain's leading directors, and Frears said their television plays "deserve to be repeated."

Somerset Maugham Award (1973) for Play Things. Thouron Award scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania (1961). Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing in a Limited Series or a Special for Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, which he wrote, won three BAFTA television awards including best drama series.

Peter Prince died on 22 September 2026, aged 84. The place and cause of death have not been made public. Obituaries appeared in The Observer, by Patrick Kidd, and in The Guardian on 9 October 2026, written by his lifelong friend Nigel Hinton. He was survived by his wife, Linda Romano, his daughter, Rosa, and his grandchildren, Ariel and JJ.