Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell (10 October 1921 – 7 September 1994), known as James Clavell, was a British and American writer, filmmaker and a British Army officer during the Second World War. He is best known for his Asian Saga novels, a number of which have had television and film adaptations.
Clavell also wrote such screenplays as those for The Fly (1958), based on the short story by George Langelaan, and The Great Escape (1963), based on the personal account of Paul Brickhill. He directed the popular 1967 film To Sir, with Love, for which he also wrote the script.
During his war service, Clavell was a prisoner-of-war to the Imperial Japan at Changi Prison, which formed the basis of his semi-autobiographical novel King Rat (1962) and its 1965 film adaptation.
Born in Sydney, Australia, Clavell was the son of Commander Richard Charles Clavell (d. 23 June 1945), a Royal Navy officer who was stationed in Australia with the Royal Australian Navy from 1920 to 1922. (Richard Clavell's father was Major R.K. Clavell.) Richard Clavell was posted back to England when James was nine months old. Clavell was educated at The Portsmouth Grammar School.
In 1940, Clavell joined the Royal Artillery, and received an emergency Regular Army commission as a second lieutenant on 10 May 1941. Though trained for desert warfare, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 he was sent to Singapore to fight the Japanese. The ship taking his unit was sunk en route to Singapore, and the survivors were picked up by a Dutch boat fleeing to India. The commander, described by Clavell years later as a "total twit", insisted that they be dropped off at the nearest port to fight the war despite having no weapons.
Shot in the face, he was captured in Java in 1942 and sent to a local Japanese prisoner of war camp. Later, he was transferred to Changi Prison in Singapore.
Changi became my university instead of my prison. Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life—the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving, the most important course of all.
Prisoners were fed a quarter of a pound (110 g) of rice per day, one egg per week and occasional vegetables. Clavell believed that if atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he would not have survived the war.
Clavell did not talk about his wartime experiences with anyone, even his wife, for 15 years after the war. For a time he carried a can of sardines in his pocket at all times and fought an urge to forage for food in rubbish bins. He also experienced bad dreams and a nervous stomach kept him awake at night.
After the war, Clavell was promoted to war-substantive lieutenant, with effect from 1 August 1942, and to temporary captain on 10 June 1946, A motorcycle crash, however, ended his military career. On 20 July 1948, he was officially discharged from the army on account of disability, leaving with the honorary rank of captain. He enrolled with the University of Birmingham, where he met April Stride, an actress, whom he married in February 1949 (date of marriage sometimes given as 1951). He would visit her on the film sets where she was working and began to be interested in becoming a film director.
Clavell entered the film industry via distribution and worked at that in England for a number of years. He tried to get into producing but had no luck, so he started writing screenplays. In 1954 he moved to New York, then to Hollywood. While trying to break into screenwriting, he paid the bills working as a carpenter.
In 1956, he sold a script about pilots to RKO, Far Alert. The same year Michael Pate bought a story of his, Forbidden Territory, for filming.
Neither was filmed but Far Alert kept being sold and re-sold. "In 18 months it brought in $87,000", he later said. "We kept getting paid for writing it and rewriting it as it went from one studio to another. It was wonderful." It was later sold to Fox where it attracted the attention of Robert L. Lippert, who hired Clavell to write the science-fiction horror movie The Fly (1958). This became a hit and launched Clavell as a screenwriter.
He wrote Watusi (1959) for director Kurt Neumann, who had also made The Fly.
Clavell wrote Five Gates to Hell (1959) for Lippert, and when they could not find a suitable director, Clavell was given the job.
Paramount hired Clavell to write a film about the Bounty mutineers. It ended up not being made, nor was a proposed movie about Francis Gary Powers. Clavell did write, produce, and direct a Western at Paramount, Walk Like a Dragon (1960).
In 1959, Clavell wrote "Moon Landing" and "First Woman in the Moon", two episodes of Men into Space, a "day after tomorrow"-style science fiction drama, which depicted, in realistic terms, the (at the time) near future of space exploration.
In 1960, Clavell wrote a Broadway show with John Sturges, White Alice, a thriller set in the Arctic. It was never produced.