W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham studied medicine and became a surgeon, spending a year practicing as a physician in some of London's poorest neighborhoods. Already, however, his writing career was manifesting itself in a serious way -- Maugham's first novel, -Liza of Lambeth, was published in 1897, when he was 23, and sold well enough to allow him to give up his medical practice. His subsequent books included -The Making of a Saint, -The Hero, -Mrs. Craddock, -The Merry-Go-Round, and -The Bishop's Apron. In 1903, his first play, A Man of Honour, was unsuccessful, but four years after that, he found success on the London stage with Lady Frederick. By 1908, four of his works were running concurrently in theaters in London, and that same year, two new novels, -The Explorer and -The Magician (the latter based on the life of Aleister Crowley), also reached print. In 1915, one of Maugham's most enduring works, the novel -Of Human Bondage, was published; the book, inspired by Maugham's memories of his own anxieties as a youth, went on to be filmed three times. His burgeoning writing career was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, and he joined the Red Cross, serving in France; it was there that he made the acquaintance of Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan who was assigned to the same ambulance. The two fell in love, and Haxton was later the basis for the character of Tony Paxton in Maugham's 1917 play Our Betters. In 1917, Maugham also took the first of his voyages to the Far East and the South Pacific, which began building his reputation as a travel writer and social satirist -- two of his most successful books were -On a Chinese Screen (1923) and -The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930), both devoted to travel.
Ironically, Maugham was so successful in hiding his relationship with Haxton and his homosexuality that, by 1917, he was serving (at the invitation of Sir John Wallinger, the head of MI6) as a secret agent on behalf of His Majesty's government, which would have prosecuted him, given half the chance. Acting as a liason between headquarters in London and agents in the field, Maugham's work took him to Geneva and later to Russia. Maugham's experiences in espionage work became the subsequent basis for his "-Ashenden" stories, usually referred to under the composite title -Ashenden, which became the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 thriller The Secret Agent. Meanwhile, Maugham himself was leading a fairly risky personal life -- he married Syrie Wellcome and the two had a daughter, but he devoted most of his energy to traveling with Haxton, who was deported from England in 1919, the year that Maugham published his romans à clef based on the life of artist Paul Gauguin, -The Moon and Sixpence. In 1921, he published his short story -Rain, part of a collection called -The Trembling of a Leaf, which was so popular that it was later adapted into three feature films (and also figured peripherally in the script of one major film in 1932, Howard Hawks' Scarface). Maugham and Haxton subsequently lived together on the French Riviera, and Maugham and his wife divorced in 1928, the same year that he published -Ashenden. He then purchased a villa on the Cote d'Azur, naming it Villa Mauresque, and, except for the interruption of World War II, he resided and conducted most of his personal life from that locale for the remainder of his life. His guests there included such luminaries as Garson Kanin, Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming (who later admitted that Maugham's -Ashenden stories provided a partial inspiration for his own James Bond books), Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Beaton, Rudyard Kipling, and Rebecca West. Following the outbreak of war in France in 1940, Maugham spent the next six years living in the United States.
Maugham's work began reaching the screen in 1915 with The Explorer, and the silent era saw such subsequent movie adaptations as Jack Straw (1920), The Ordeal (1922), East of Suez (1925), The Magician (1926), and Sadie Thompson (1928), with the first adaptation of The Letter appearing in 1929. Lewis Milestone's 1932 film Rain was the first film of Maugham's work during the sound era to endure in popularity past its initial release, and, in 1934, Of Human Bondage, starring Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, became the first film version of his novel of the same name. That movie, usually regarded as the best of the three versions, has been handed down in generally substandard editions, however, as the studio failed to preserve a negative or a fine grain 35 mm print of the film after the 1946 remake was produced. Maugham was the highest paid author in the world during the 1930s, a decade in which (though he stopped writing plays after 1933) he also enjoyed his heyday on the screen, as adaptations of his writings appeared annually. Some, such as Hitchcock's The Secret Agent, were less than satisfying (though not through any fault of Maugham's), while others, such as The Beachcomber (1938), proved inspired vehicles for their directors and casts, and one, The Letter (1940), proved a Hollywood classic. The Moon and Sixpence came to the screen in 1943 as an independent production and played a peripheral but important role in bringing future producer/director Stanley Kramer into the movie business as a filmmaker; the latter movie also marked the first of two occasions on which Herbert Marshall portrayed the author on the screen.
Maugham's work, which generally took an anti-war stance that had grown out of his experiences during the First World War, all but disappeared from films during World War II. The major exception was a genuine oddity in his output, -The Hour Before the Dawn (1942), which Maugham wrote at the request of the British Ministry of Information on behalf of the current war effort and which told the interesting story of a pacifist English nobleman who marries an Austrian refugee and then discovers that she is pro-Nazi and has been spying for the Germans. He kills her and, in an effort at redemption for his errors in judgment, volunteers for commando service on the European continent. Maugham refused to allow the book to be published in England, but as the newest work of a major author, it was snapped up in America and the screen rights were purchased by Paramount Pictures. The resulting script was assigned to Paramount's top thriller director, Frank Tuttle, with Franchot Tone cast as the nobleman and Veronica Lake, the studio's most popular female lead, as the spy; the latter was a major embarrassment, as Lake proved incapable of delivering a line or a word in even a quasi-German accent without evoking laughter from audiences and critics alike. The 1944 movie, which later passed into the hands of Universal when Paramount's pre-1948 film library was sold to Universal, hasn't been shown or seen in many years, and Maugham refused to include the novel in his official cannon of works, although it bounced in and out of print at least until the end of the 1950s.
The same year that The Hour Before the Dawn appeared in theaters, Maugham published his last major novel, -The Razor's Edge. A pacifist work that took place between the two World Wars, and which was partly set in Chicago (where Maugham spent a major part of his stay in America), it was a critical and popular success, and set the stage for a new wave of screen activity. The end of the war saw a new interest in Maugham's work, represented in Hollywood by a poor remake of Of Human Bondage (1946) and a dazzling, ambitious adaptation of The Razor's Edge (1946), starring Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, and Clifton Webb, with Marshall again portraying the author. British producers began availing themselves of Maugham's short works in the late 1940s with Quartet (1948), Trio (1950), and Encore (1951), all of which were popular anthology films that also included small, uncredited appearances by the author himself, and in 1950 and 1951, he appeared as the host of the television series Somerset Maugham Theater, which presented live adaptations -- made necessary as the "film" rights had already been sold -- of many of his best known works, including a version of -The Moon and Sixpence starring Lee J. Cobb. Miss Sadie Thompson (1953) brought Rita Hayworth in a new adaptation of -Rain, Robert Newton starred in a remake of The Beachcomber (1954), and Three Cases of Murder (1955) marked another successful anthology film based on Maugham's short works.
Although none of his novels after -The Razor's Edge was commercially successful, screen adaptations of his work continued to appear intermittently during the 1960s, most notably After the Fox (1966). By that time, the author's private life was something of an open secret -- he had returned to France in 1946 and was living openly with Alan Searle (Gerald Haxton had died in New York in 1944).
Noël Coward (who had hidden his own homosexuality for decades, until the laws and social attitudes changed) dedicated his 1955 play, Point Valaine, to Maugham and used the older writer's life as the basis for a roman à clef entitled A Song at Twilight in 1966, one year after Maugham had passed away at the age of 91. Adaptations of his work continued to grace television and occasionally reach the big screen, among them the 1984 big-budget remake of The Razor's Edge starring Bill Murray. Maugham was also cited definitively as one of the major authors of the 20th century in the rush to qualify and quantify at the end of that 100-year cycle. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide