Rom-com director case study:

Richard Curtis

Richard Curtis directed 'Love Actually', which is arguably one of the best rom-coms out in the film industry. He was awarded an MBE in 1994 before receiving a CBE in 2000 for his contribution to television and film comedy. Richard Curtis was also behind the writing of 'Notting Hill' and 'Bridget Jones's Diary'.


Curtis was born in Wellington, New Zealand. Curtis and his family lived in many different countries and were constantly travelling during his childhood, he travelled to Sweden and even the Philippines. Curtis moved to England when he was 11, and began school at Papplewick School Ascot, before he earned a scholarship to Harrow School in London, he then achieved a first class degree in English Language and Literature at Christchurch Oxford. It was at Oxford where he met and began working with Rowan Atkinson.


Collaborating with Rowan Atkinson in the Oxford Revue, he appeared alongside Atkinson at his breakthrough Edinburgh Fringe show. As a result of this, Curtis was commissioned to co-write the BBC Radio 3 series The Atkinson People with Atkinson in 1978, which was transmitted in 1979.
He then began writing comedy for film and tv, he was a regular on the the tv series 'Not the nine o'clock news' where he wrote many of the shows songs with Howard Goodall and many sketches often with Rowan Atkinson.

First with Atkinson, and later with Ben Elton, Curtis then wrote the Blackadder series from 1983 to 1989, each season focusing upon a different era in British history. Atkinson played the lead throughout, but Curtis remains the only person to have been a writer for every episode of Blackadder. The pair continued their collaboration with the comedy series Mr. Bean. which ran from 1990–1995.n 1994, Curtis created and co-wrote The Vicar of Dibley for comedian Dawn French, which was a great success. In an online poll conducted in 2004 Britain's Best Sitcom, The Vicar of Dibley was voted the third best sitcom in British history and Blackadder the second, making Curtis the only screenwriter to have created two shows within the poll's top ten programmes.

Curtis Film Career.

Curtis achieved his breakthrough success with the romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral. The 1994 film, starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell, was produced on a limited budget by the British production company Working Title Films. Four Weddings and a Funeral proved to be the biggest grossing British film in history at that time. It made an international star of Grant, and Curtis' Oscar nomination for the script catapulted him to prominence but Richard Curtis lost to Quentin Tarantino's script for Pulp Fiction.

Curtis' next film was also for Working Title, which has remained his artistic home ever since. 1999's Notting Hill, starring Hugh Grant andJulia Roberts, broke the record set by Four Weddings and a Funeral to become the top-grossing British film of all time. The story of a lonely travel bookstore owner who falls in love with the world's most famous movie star was directed by Roger Michell. Curtis' next film for Working Title was not an original script. Instead, he was heavily involved with the adaptation of Bridget Jones's Diary from novel to film.