Ray Connolly

Ray Connolly (born 4 December 1940) is a British writer. He is best known for his journalism and for writing the screenplays for the films That'll Be the Day and its sequel Stardust, for which he won a Writers' Guild of Great Britain Best Screenplay award. He has written many articles for the Daily Mail, as well as The Sunday Times, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Observer. His novels include; A Girl Who Came to Stay, Newsdeath, Sunday Morning, Shadows on a Wall and Love out of Season (which was adapted for radio as God Bless Our Love) and Sorry, Boys, You Failed The Audition. His biography of Elvis Presley, Being Elvis – A Lonely Life was published in 2016. For the cinema he wrote the films That'll Be The Day and its sequel, Stardust – which was voted the Best Screenplay of 1974 by the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. He also wrote and directed the feature-length documentary entitled James Dean: The First American Teenager, while his television drama series have included Honky Tonk Heroes, Lytton's Diary and Perfect Scoundrels. TV films include Forever Young for Channel 4 and Defrosting the Fridge for the BBC, while he co-wrote, with Alan Benson, the BBC 2 George Martin series about music The Rhythm of Life. He has also written several radio plays, including Lost Fortnight (which is about Raymond Chandler in Hollywood), the series Tim Merryman's Days of Clover, and Sorry, Boys, You Failed the Audition, as well as several short stories for various publications, which are collected in A Handful of Love.