Frank Cottrell-Boyce (born 23 September 1959) is an English screenwriter, novelist and occasional actor, known for his children's fiction and for his collaborations with film director Michael Winterbottom. He has achieved fame as the writer for the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony and for sequels to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car, a children's classic by Ian Fleming.
Cottrell-Boyce has won two major British awards for children's books, the 2004 Carnegie Medal for Millions, which originated as a film script, and the 2012 Guardian Prize for The Unforgotten Coat, which was commissioned by a charity.
Personal life
Cottrell-Boyce was born in 1959 in Bootle near Liverpool to a Catholic family. He moved to Rainhill, while still at primary school. He attended St Bartholomew's Primary School in Rainhill and West Park Grammar School. He was greatly influenced by reading Moomins growing up.
He read English at Keble College, Oxford, where he went on to earn a doctorate. He wrote criticism for the magazine Living Marxism. As a result, there was supposedly always a copy of the magazine on sale in the newsagent set of long-running British soap Coronation Street, while Cottrell-Boyce was on the writing staff of that programme.
He met Denise Cottrell, a fellow Keble undergraduate, and they married in Keble College chapel. Together they have seven children. He is also a patron of the Insight Film Festival, a biennial, interfaith festival held in Manchester, UK, to make positive contributions to understanding, respect and community cohesion.
Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, one of the couple's sons, is also a writer.
Career
He was a leading light in the Liverpool band "Dead Trout" in 1979.
After he met Michael Winterbottom, the two collaborated on Forget About Me. Winterbottom made five further films based on screenplays written by Cottrell-Boyce, Butterfly Kiss, Welcome to Sarajevo, The Claim, 24 Hour Party People and Code 46. Their 2005 collaboration, A Cock and Bull Story, is their last according to Cottrell-Boyce, who asked that his contribution be credited to "Martin Hardy", a pseudonym. He told Variety, "I just had to move on ... what better way to walk away than by giving Winterbottom a good script for free?"
Other film directors Cottrell-Boyce has worked with include Danny Boyle (Millions), Alex Cox (Revengers Tragedy), Richard Laxton (Grow Your Own) and Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie).
Cottrell-Boyce has been praised by Roger Ebert as one of the few truly inventive modern-day screenwriters. He has spoken against the "three-act structure" and the "hero's journey" formulas, which are often regarded as axiomatic truths in the business. perhaps his most famous example of this is in 24 Hour Party People where the character of Anthony Wilson states that “Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. This is Manchester. We do things differently. This is the second act” which Cottrell-Boyce has stated was due to criticism of the script not following the three act structure.
In addition to original scripts, Cottrell-Boyce has also adapted novels for the screen and written children's fiction. His first novel Millions was based on his own screenplay for the film of the same name; it was published by Macmillan in 2004. Cottrell-Boyce won the annual Carnegie Medal from the British librarians, recognising it as the year's best children's book published in the U.K. His next novel Framed, he made the shortlist for both the Carnegie and the Whitbread Children's Book Award. He adapted it as a screenplay for a 2009 BBC television film. He made the Carnegie shortlist again for Cosmic (2008). In 2011, he was commissioned to write a sequel to the Ian Fleming children's book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was published in October 2011 as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again. In addition to Coronation Street, he wrote many episodes of the soap opera Brookside, as well as its spin-offs Damon and Debbie and South.
He wrote and staged his first original theatre production Proper Clever at the Liverpool Playhouse during the city's European Capital of Culture Year, in 2008. On 18 September 2010, he co-presented the Papal Visit at Hyde Park with TV personality Carol Vorderman. In June 2012, he assumed the position of Professor of Reading (the first such professorship) at Liverpool Hope University.