Craig Warner (born 25 April 1964) is a multiple award-winning playwright and screenwriter who lives and works in Suffolk, England.[1]
His play Strangers on a Train, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, ran in London's West End in 2013–14, and starred Jack Huston, Laurence Fox, Miranda Raison, Imogen Stubbs, Christian McKay, and MyAnna Buring. It was directed by Robert Allan Ackerman and produced by Barbara Broccoli.[2][3]
He wrote The Queen's Sister for Channel 4, which was nominated for several BAFTA awards (including Best Single Drama), Maxwell for BBC2, which garnered a Broadcasting Press Guild Award nomination for Best Single Drama and won David Suchet an International Emmy for Best Actor, and The Last Days of Lehman Brothers,[4] for which Warner was longlisted for a BAFTA Craft Award for Best Writer, and which won him the award for Best Writer at the Seoul International Drama Awards in 2010. He wrote the mini-series Julius Caesar for Warner Bros., which gained Warner a Writers Guild Award nomination for Best Original Long-Form Drama, and he performed an extensive uncredited rewrite on The Mists of Avalon, also for Warner Bros., which was nominated for a Writers Guild Award and nine Emmys, including Best Mini-series. Warner wrote the screenplay for Codebreaker, a film about Alan Turing.
Craig Warner started out writing for the theatre and for radio. His first radio play for BBC Radio 4, Great Men of Music, was performed by Philip Davis and was included in Radio 4's first Young Playwrights Festival. His second play By Where the Old Shed Used to Be, with Miranda Richardson, won the Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Plays of the Year, and it was included in the volume of winners for 1989, published by Methuen. His play Figure With Meat also won a Giles Cooper Award and was published in the Methuen volume of 1991. Craig Warner is the award's youngest ever winner, having received it for the first time when he was 24. He is also a composer and has written music and songs for a number of his works, including a full-length musical for BBC Radio 3 about the legend of Cassandra, called Agonies Awakening. He runs the production company 25th Image, for which he produces and directs the podcast comedy-drama Night Games, also playing a leading role alongside Michael Maloney.
Warner received a BA in philosophy from King's College London and an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He was born in Los Angeles.