Peter Prince, the novelist and screenwriter whose best-known work, The Good Father, was adapted into a 1985 film starring Anthony Hopkins, has died aged 84, according to an obituary published by the Guardian. He was born on 10 May 1942 and died on 22 September 2026.
His first novel, Play Things (1972), won the Somerset Maugham award. The book he became most associated with, The Good Father, appeared in 1983.
In that story the title figure is a man whose backing for women’s liberation collapses once his wife is granted custody of their son. Bitter and furious, and acting against everything he had previously stood for, he pushes another man in the same predicament — played by Jim Broadbent in the 1985 screen version — towards legal action, with disastrous results.
According to the Guardian, the novel displays the qualities that run through all of Prince’s fiction: a sharp but unjudging eye for human weakness and a faultless sense of how people actually speak. He was drawn to the ordinary and mined comedy from it, while carrying an instinctive sympathy for the underdog and the misfit.
Television and screen work
Prince adapted Play Things himself for television. Directed by Stephen Frears, it went out in 1976 as part of the BBC Playhouse strand. The pair went on to work together repeatedly, on the television films Early Struggles (1976), Last Summer (1977) and Cold Harbour (1978), on the cinema release The Hit (1984), with Terence Stamp and John Hurt, and on the stage play Television Times (1980), staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Arguably his most memorable television achievement was Oppenheimer (1980), the seven-part series about the Manhattan Project. Broadcast by the BBC and by PBS in the United States, with Sam Waterston in the lead role, it won a Bafta for best drama series and earned Prince an Emmy nomination for his screenplay.
Novels and later career
His third novel, Agents of a Foreign Power, appeared in 1977. Near its close, the Guardian notes, a character who in many respects resembles the author finds himself stranded in the wrong era and the wrong country, halfway up a drainpipe.
That sense of dislocation runs through his central figures. They are typically hesitant, unsure and somewhat passive, watching life rather than driving it — among them the narrator of Waterloo Story (1999), so self-effacing that he is nicknamed Ghost, and a further leading character who fears he has a coward’s soul. The protagonists of the novels set in and around south London, his home ground, are all uncomfortable and long to get away. Even the hero of his 18th-century novel is desperate to leave England, which gave the 2005 book its title, Adam Runaway.
His other novels include Death of a Soap Queen (1990), The Great Circle (1997) and Bubbles (2000). Alongside them he kept writing for the screen, including an adaptation of Graham Swift’s 1983 novel Waterland for a 1992 film starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke.
In his final years he worked on a story about a doctor named Pache in the Napoleonic army. The manuscript was heavily revised and rewritten but never published.
Early life
The youngest of three children, Prince was born in Bromley, Kent, to Audrey (nee Kelley), a secretary at the Ministry of Defence, and John Prince, a war correspondent for the Times who later became a medical journalist for the Daily Telegraph.
He attended Dulwich College as a scholarship boy under the “Dulwich experiment” scheme, under which pupils were admitted on academic ability alone with local authority funding. A capable student, he was nevertheless unhappy there.
In 1961 he left the grey suburbia of his youth as an early recipient of the Thouron award, one of a small number of undergraduate scholarships then granted, which took him to the University of Pennsylvania for a degree majoring in history. He had dreamed as a teenager of living in the United States and threw himself into what he found: he became a devoted follower of American football and indulged a fascination with the civil war by touring its battlefields. He also met a fellow student, Beth Freeman, and they married in 1965.
After graduating he moved to Columbia University for an MA, again in history. Returning to the UK in 1966, he enrolled at Cambridge University but once more felt out of place and left before completing a PhD on the history of Sunday newspapers, particularly the Observer.
Writing finally gave him his footing. He began in 1969 as a subeditor on magazine partworks, and then used a short spell in the summer of 1970 supervising an adventure playground in Battersea Park as the material for Play Things.
A school friendship
The Guardian’s obituary records that its author and Prince became close friends at school. They shared the same tastes in books, film and music, and, the piece states, no one could make the writer laugh the way Prince could.
He is survived by his second wife, Linda Romano, whom he married in 1987; by his daughter, Rosa, a biographer and political commentator, from his marriage to Beth, which ended in divorce in 1982; and by his grandchildren, Ariel and JJ.
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