Bruce Robinson

Such is the mythology that has sprung up around Bruce Robinson's first film, the openly autobiographical Withnail & I (1987), that it's often hard to separate fact from fiction. But the facts appear to be these: trained as an actor at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, he got off to a good early start when he was given a reasonably prominent part as Benvolio in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968). But despite this and other parts for the likes of Ken Russell (The Music Lovers (1971)) and François Truffaut (the male lead in The Story of Adele H (1975)), he found that acting mostly involved fruitless waiting for the phone to ring interspersed with the occasional TV commercial, while desperately trying to make ends meet. So he began writing screenplays in the mid-1970s, and was lucky enough to secure the patronage of producer David Puttnam who finally produced Robinson's script about Cambodia, The Killing Fields (1984) for which he was nominated for an Oscar. But cult su