Nigel Kneale - Family

Family

In the early 1950s Kneale met fellow BBC screenwriter Judith Kerr, a Jewish refugee, in the BBC canteen. They married on 8 May 1954 and had two children; Matthew, who later became a successful novelist, and Tacy, an actress and later a special effects designer who worked on the popular Harry Potter series of films. Kerr became a successful children's writer, with the Mog series of books and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which was based on her own experiences of fleeing Nazi Germany in her youth. Kneale worked with Kerr on an adaptation of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit in the 1970s, but the eventual makers of the film version disregarded their script. Similarly, in 1995 Kneale scripted a four-part adaptation of one of Kerr's sequels to the book, A Small Person Far Away, but this also went unproduced.

Kneale was proud of his son's success as a writer. When his novel English Passengers won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 2001, his father commented that: "Matthew's much better than I am. I just wrote screenplays."

Kneale's younger brother is the renowned artist and sculptor Bryan Kneale, who was Master and then Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy from 1982 to 1990. Bryan Kneale painted the covers for the Quatermass script books released by Penguin Books in 1959 and 1960. He was also responsible for a painting of a lobster from which special effects designers Bernard Wilkie and Jack Kine drew their inspiration for the Martian creatures they constructed for the original television version of Quatermass and the Pit.