Alan Sharp (12 January 1934 – 8 February 2013) was a Scottish novelist and screenwriter. He published two novels in the 1960s, and subsequently wrote the screenplays for about twenty films, mostly produced in the United States.Sharp was raised in Greenock, Scotland, the son of a single mother, and he was adopted at the age of six weeks by Margaret and Joseph Sharp, a shipyard worker. His adoptive parents belonged to a Salvation Army church. Alan left school at 14 to apprentice in the yards, the first of a long series of odd jobs he held prior to his national military service and marriage. Eventually he married four times. He ultimately relocated to London with the intention of becoming a writer. One of his screenplays was broadcast on British television in 1963, and his play A Knight in Tarnished Armour was broadcast in 1965. His first novel, A Green Tree in Gedde, was published in 1965 to acclaim and won the 1967 Scottish Arts Council Award. It was the first part of a proposed trilogy, and Sharp published the second novel, The Wind Shifts, in 1967. The third novel, which had the working title The Apple Pickers, was left incomplete when Sharp emigrated to Hollywood and focused on screenwriting.In the 1970s, six of Sharp's screenplays became high-profile Hollywood feature films, most of them dealing with quintessentially American themes and characters. Walter Chaw writes of Sharp's screenplays from this period, "On the strength of his scripts for The Hired Hand, Ulzana's Raid, and Night Moves, Scottish novelist Alan Sharp seems well at home with the better-known, more highly regarded writers and directors of the New American Cinema. Sharp's screenplays are marked by a narrative complexity and situations gravid with implication and doom." Trevor Johnston had written recently, "There's an argument to suggest that a certain seventysomething Scot could well be Britain's greatest living screenwriter. Much is made of pre-Star Wars '70s Hollywood as a kind of celluloid golden age, and Alan Sharp was there in the thick of it, working with the very best, generating the sort of track record few British screenwriters are likely to match."David N. Meyer has incorporated an appreciation of Sharp's writing in his review of Night Moves (directed by Arthur Penn-1975). Following a description of an important seduction scene from the film, Meyer adds: "These delicious, poisonous moments – these cookies full of arsenic – come courtesy of Alan Sharp's venomous, entrapping, perfectly circular screenplay. It's hard not to regard him – rather than Penn – as the engine of Night Moves' enduring power. Sharp had an unbroken forty year career writing features and television."Since the 1980s, most of Sharp's screenplays had been for American television productions. His 1993 television screenplay (with Walter Klenhard) for The Last Hit was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award (best TV feature or miniseries). His feature film projects included The Osterman
Left school at 14 and began a long series of odd jobs working as an apprentice in shipyards, as the assistant to a private detective, as an English teacher in Germany, a construction laborer, dishwasher, night switchboard operator in a burglar-alarm company, and a packer for a carpet company. Plus, he also labored for IBM.
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Was married four times, and had six children and two stepsons.
Was adopted when he was six weeks old by dockworker Joseph Sharp and his wife Margaret, members of a Scottish church affiliated with the Salvation Army.
Writer
Title
Year
Status
Character
Ulzana's Raid
1972
written by
The Hired Hand
1971
The Last Run
1971
original screenplay
Play for Today
1970
TV Series writer - 1 episode
ITV Playhouse
1970
TV Series writer - 1 episode
Double Image
1966
TV Mini-Series documentary script - 1 episode
The Wednesday Play
1965
TV Series writer - 1 episode
First Night
1963
TV Series writer - 1 episode
Ben Hur
2010
TV Mini-Series writer - 2 episodes
Dean Spanley
2008
written by
Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
2006
TV Mini-Series teleplay - 1 episode
Avenger
2006
TV Movie teleplay
While I Was Gone
2004
TV Movie teleplay
Reversible Errors
2004
TV Movie teleplay
Lathe of Heaven
2002
TV Movie teleplay
Little Girl Fly Away
1998
TV Movie teleplay
Rob Roy
1995
screenplay
Betrayed by Love
1994
TV Movie written by
The Last Hit
1993
TV Movie teleplay
Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis