Giles Cooper - Early Life

Early Life

Giles Cooper was born into a landed Anglo-Irish family at Carrickmines near Dublin on 9 August 1918, the son of a Royal Navy Commander, Guy Edward Cooper, and the nephew of the politician and writer Bryan Ricco Cooper. He was educated at the prep school Arnold House, St John's Wood, London, at Lancing College on the South Downs, and later studied languages in Grenoble in the French Alps and at a language school at San Sebastian in Northern Spain. It was here, with the Spanish Civil War raging around him, that he was shot through the arm one evening by a sniper's bullet, while on a mission to purchase cigarettes before dinner. The Royal Navy subsequently came to his rescue, gave him medical attention and dropped him off across the French border at St. Jean de Luz.

His father had planned the life of a diplomat for him, in which a Cambridge degree in Law and a Call to the Bar were prerequisites. Cooper, however, confounded these plans by enrolling as an actor at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. A contemporary, joining on the same morning was the actor Michael Denison who recalls their first meeting in his autobiography Overture & Beginners. Cooper's studies were interrupted by the Second World War. Initially conscripted into the ranks, he was selected for training at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, gained a commission and was subsequently despatched to the Far East in 1942. He served as an infantry officer in the West Yorkshire Regiment, spending three grueling years in the jungles of Burma fighting the Japanese, on occasion hand-to-hand.

After the war he worked as an actor, first at the Arts Theatre under Alec Clunes, where he met his future wife, the actress Gwyneth Lewis. Seasons in repertory theatre at Newquay (with Kenneth Williams) at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing (with Harold Pinter) and at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre continued until 1952 when he turned to script editing and then full-time writing.