Pierre Boulle

Biography

Pierre Boulle was a French novelist best known for two works, The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) and Planet of the Apes (1963), which were both made into award-winning films.

He was an engineer serving as a secret agent with the Free French in Singapore, when he was captured and subjected to two years of forced labor. He used these experiences in The Bridge over the River Kwai, about the notorious Death Railway, which became an international bestseller. 

David Lean made the book into a motion picture that won seven 1957 Oscars, including Best Picture, and Best Actor for Alec Guinness. Boulle himself won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay despite not having written the screenplay and, by his own admission, not even speaking English. 

Boulle had been credited with the screenplay because the film's actual screenwriters, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, had been blacklisted as communist sympathizers. The Motion Picture Academy added Foreman's and Wilson's names to the award in 1984.

In 1963, following several other reasonably successful novels, Boulle published his other famous novel, Planet of the Apes. In 1968 the book was made into an Oscar-winning film, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston. 

The screenplay, originally written by Rod Serling, focused more on action and deviated in many ways from the novel, including the addition of its own classic twist ending that was different from the novel's. 

It inspired four sequels, a television series, an animated series, a 2001 remake of the original title by Tim Burton, a 2011 reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, followed by the sequel Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017).

Boulle died in Paris, France on 30 January 1994, at age 81.