James Clavell

James Clavell (born October 10, 1924, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia—died September 6, 1994, Vevey, Switzerland) was an Australian-born British author, director, and screenwriter best known for his popular action novels set within Asian cultures, in particular Shōgun (1975), which became an international bestseller and was adapted into a television miniseries (1980) that was a huge ratings success. In 2024 another miniseries adaptation of Shōgun, produced by FX, premiered on Hulu and was met with great acclaim.

Early life and military service

Clavell’s father was a commander in the Royal Navy who was stationed in Australia, where Clavell was born. The family moved back to England when Clavell was nine months old. Growing up, Clavell developed a fascination with Asia from having often heard his father recount his experiences serving in China before World War I. He attended public school in Portsmouth, England, but his education was interrupted by the start of World War II in 1939. Eager to carry on his family’s military tradition, he signed up for service and became a member of the Royal Artillery in the British Army, eventually rising to the rank of captain.

In 1942 Clavell was captured on Java by the Japanese in the fall of Singapore. Only 17 years old at the time and wounded from a gunshot to his face that he sustained while trying to escape capture, he spent the next three years as a prisoner of war (POW) in two prison camps, including Changi prison in Singapore. Conditions at Changi were such that disease and malnutrition were common, and only 1 in 15 prisoners survived. Clavell’s incarceration there had a profound impact on him. In an interview with The New York Times in 1981 he said, “Changi became my university instead of my prison.…I learned the art of surviving, the most important course of all.”

After the Japanese surrendered in 1945, Clavell was released from Changi and returned to England. A motorcycle injury caused him to leave the military in 1946. He spent a year studying at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and working odd jobs. He developed an interest in film and got his start in the motion-picture industry as a distributor. Eventually, he made his way to Hollywood.

Career in film

Clavell’s first writings were screenplays, beginning with The Fly (1958), a horror film about a scientific experiment gone frightfully wrong, starring Vincent Price. The script was based on George Langelaan’s 1957 short story of the same name, and the film was nominated for a Hugo Award, which recognizes notable achievements in science fiction and science fantasy and is bestowed by the World Science Fiction Society. Clavell’s first time in the director’s chair was for the film Five Gates to Hell (1959), a war drama about a group of Red Cross medical workers who are held captive by Chinese guerrillas in Vietnam. Clavell also produced the feature and wrote the screenplay. In 1963 Clavell cowrote (with W.R. Burnett) the screenplay for The Great Escape, based on Paul Brickhill’s novel from 1950 about POWs in a German camp during World War II. The hit movie featured several action movie stars, including Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson, as well as the esteemed Richard Attenborough. Clavell and Burnett’s screenplay was nominated for an award for best written American drama by the Writers Guild of America.

Clavell’s next significant directing gig was the film To Sir, with Love (1967), an adaptation of Guyanese writer E.R. Braithwaite’s 1959 autobiographical novel about a Black engineer who takes a teaching position in an all-white school in a working-class neighborhood in London after being excluded from work in his own field because of racism. The film starred Sidney Poitier and was a huge success, earning $15 million at the box office (after a production budget of $500,000) and garnering Clavell an award nomination for outstanding directorial achievement by the Directors Guild of America.

Asian Saga novel series

In 1960 Clavell turned to writing novels, having extra time on his hands because of a screenwriters strike that year. He based his first novel, King Rat (1962; film 1965), on his experiences as a POW, and writing the book proved to be a cathartic experience for him. King Rat was the first book in what he called his “Asian Saga,” which chronicles the adventures and exploits of English characters throughout Asia, spanning various countries and eras over the course of the series. Struggles for power and wealth and, secondarily, sex and love occupy his fiction, with plots that center on the clash between East and West and between men and women. Clavell’s other novels in the Asian Saga are Tai-Pan (1966; film 1986) and Noble House (1981; TV miniseries 1988), set in 19th-century and mid-20th-century Hong Kong, respectively; Shōgun (1975), set in 17th-century Japan; Whirlwind (1986), set in Iran during its 1979 revolution; and Gai-Jin (1993), set in 19th-century Japan.

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Though all the books in the Asian Saga were bestsellers, Shōgun was the standout. The novel offers a fictionalized account of navigator William Adams, who was the first Englishman to set foot in Japan and became the trusted adviser of Japanese shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. Clavell was inspired to write the novel after coming upon an intriguing sentence about Adams in his daughter’s school textbook: “In 1600, an Englishman went to Japan and became a samurai.” Clavell spent two years researching the history and culture of Japan, refashioning Adams and Tokugawa into the characters John Blackthorne and Lord Yoshii Toranaga, respectively. Despite his extensive research, the historical accuracy of the novel was questioned by some critics and historians, but the book still found a huge readership.

In 1980 a TV miniseries based on Shōgun became one of the most popular miniseries ever made. Starring Richard Chamberlain, Mifune Toshirō, and Shimada Yōko, it won an Emmy Award in 1981 for outstanding limited series. Clavell had served as executive producer. In 2024 Hulu and the FX TV channel debuted a new miniseries based on the novel, starring Sanada Hiroyuki, Cosmo Jarvis, Anna Sawai, and Asano Tadanobu. Whereas the 1980 series was filmed mostly in English and centers on Blackthorne, the 2024 version is predominantly in Japanese and privileges the Japanese perspective. The 2024 miniseries swept the Emmy Awards that year, becoming the first non-English-language series to win the Emmy for best drama. Sanada and Sawai won for lead actor and actress, respectively, and made history as the first Japanese actors to win in those categories. The series also won 14 Emmys in the creative arts (i.e., technical) categories and 18 Emmys overall, the most that any drama won in a single season.

Other works and achievements

Clavell’s other works include a children’s book, Thrump-o-moto (1976), and a novella, The Children’s Story (1963), which offers a political fable about the Cold War. He received honorary doctorates in literature from the University of Bradford in England and the University of Maryland in the United States. Clavell died of cancer at age 69.