AustLit

Alec Coppel was born Alexander Coppel in Melbourne, the son of Maurice Coppel, a Melbourne-born financier, and Elizabeth Coppell, nee Affleck. He had a brother Albert and a sister Sarah Amelia.

He attended Wesley College, where he was involved in the Wesley College Dramatic Society: a newspaper report from 1925 notes,

'Special praise is due to those boys who took the parts of female characters in the plays presented by the Wesley College Dramatic Society, in the Playhouse. There was a large attendance, and the clever handling of the different situations was enjoyed by the audience. In "Help, Help," by Mr. Sewell Collins, the principal parts were played by Alec Coppel and Grant McIntyre, supported by James Blake and John Busat, who also took a leading part in Miss Gertrude Jennings's piece, "In the Cellar." The chief characters in Mr. A.A. Milne's "Wurzel-Flummery" were portrayed by Alec Coppel and Walter Scott.'

Source: 'Wesley Dramatic Society', The Argus, 26 August 1925, p.15.

In 1927, he went to England, intending to study medicine at Cambridge, but did not complete his studies, and instead began to write.

From the earliest days of his professional writing career, Coppel worked across multiple formats: his earliest produced play (Short Circuit) appeared onstage in 1935, and his first screenplay was filmed in 1937. This prepared the way for a career that exploited the possibilities of the many formats available to writers, as Coppel turned novels into plays, plays into radio scripts and films, films into novels, and short stories into television.

His first major success was the comic thriller I Killed the Count (1937), which was a West End success and played extended seasons in Australia and the United States. The play is typical of the textual intricacies that mark Coppel's career. Coppel novelised it in 1939, and adapted it for film twice himself (in 1948 and 1956). It was also adapted twice more by other writers: once for film (in 1939) and once as part of the anthology television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (in 1957).

Between 1937 and 1940, Coppel had a number of other plays staged in London and on the English provincial theatre circuits, as well as writing films.

Coppel returned to Australia in 1940, to work as a theatrical director in Melbourne (directing Marie Ney in a series of pieces for J.C. Williamson Theatres). In Australia, he struck up a friendship and business partnership with actor Kathleen Robinson: the two co-founded Whitehall Theatrical Productions, which staged their plays in the Minerva Theatre, Sydney.

Coppel worked as director and producer for Whitehall Productions for three years, from 1941, staging a wide range of plays (see Stephen Vagg for more details). He also continued to write: one of the plays he staged was his own Mr Smart Guy (1941)–which, in his typical fashion, he adapted for the screen (in 1951) after he returned to the UK. He also produced works on a smaller scale during this period: the radio drama A Rum Affair, for example, was broadcast on the ABC in 1940.

His other involvements with Australian radio in this period included contributions to the long-running Macquarie Radio Theatre (which aired Sunday nights, 8pm, on 2GB): he was appointed to the position of producer for the series in late 1941, and newspaper articles announcing his appointment described him as 'the man who as dramatist and producer has been responsible for the rebirth of the Australian theatre over the past 12 months' (Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate, 17 December 1941, p.12).

Coppel severed his ties with Whitehall Theatrical Productions in April 1944, and shortly thereafter returned to England, where he returned to writing playscripts and novels, but also increased his involvement with the film industry.

He wrote a succession of thrillers and crime-comedies for British film producers and the burgeoning television industry, many of them based on his own plays (as with Two on the Tiles, filmed in 1951 and adapted from a 1939 play Believe It or Not) and novels (as with Mr Denning Drives North, filmed in 1952 from a 1950 novel).

His most successful film (or, at least, his most successful film unaccompanied by controversy) came in 1953: the Alec Guiness vehicle The Captain's Paradise, which made Coppel the first Australian writer to be nominated for an Oscar (for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story). Typically of Coppel, he later turned the story into a play.

In 1958, while Coppel was working in the United States, came the biggest film with which he was associated: Vertigo. But Coppel was the middle of three script-writers (all playwrights, and the other two American writers) to work on that project, and he had to lodge a protest with the Screen Writers Guild to gain a writing credit for the script, which would otherwise have been credited solely to Samuel A. Taylor.

Hollywood was also the site of Coppel's biggest success since I Killed the Count: the humourous thriller The Gazebo had been first produced onstage in New York, and was to enjoy an extended run in London in 1960. In the interim, it was filmed as a successful comedy starring Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds. (So successful was The Gazebo that it was later to be filmed once in West Germany and twice in France.)

Coppel's final credits were for the so-called 'sex comedies' The Bliss of Mrs Blossom (1968) and The Statue (1971).

He died in early 1972.