Biography for
C.S. Lewis More at IMDb Pro »
Date of Birth
29
November 1898, Belfast, Ireland.
[now Northern Ireland, UK]
Date
of Death
22 November 1963, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK (uremia caused by kidney failure)
Birth
Name
Clive
Staples Lewis
Nickname
Jack
Mini
Biography
C.S.
Lewis was born in 1898 and brought up in a very strict, religious household.
While he was quite young, his mother died of cancer but the "stiff upper
lip" in favour at the time meant he wasn't allowed to grieve. He became an
Oxford don and led a sheltered life. He seriously questioned his religious
beliefs and finally left the church. The death of his mother is reflected in
"The Magician's Nephew". When an American fan Joy Gresham, came to
visit him, they found they enjoyed each others company and she stayed. She was
dying of cancer and he was afraid to express his emotions until she convinced
him that it was OK to "allow" himself to
love her even though it would shortly lead to heartbreak when she died. This
was a great writer who dared to examine his emotions and beliefs and record
them for the rest of us. Most famous for his childrens
book (The Narnian Chronicles) he also wrote a very
interesting Science Fiction Trilogy and some of the most intriguing Christian
literature. He finally resolved his crisis of faith after tearing apart and
fully examining the Christian (and other) religion and re-embraced
Christianity.
IMDb Mini Biography By: Steve Crook
Spouse
Trivia
The
play of "Shadowlands", also by William Nicholson ran in
London, starring Nigel Hawthorne
and Jane Lapotaire.
Member of the Oxford literary circle the 'Inklings' along with
writers J.R.R. Tolkien,
Jeremy Dyson, Charles Williams, Messrs Coghill, and
Owen Barfield.
As
a child he never liked his birth names, Clive Staples. When his dog, Jacksie, got run down he announced that he would always be
known by the name of his dead dog. It developed from "Jacksie"
to "Jack" over the years. Many of his fans refer to him as "Jack
Lewis."
Died on 22 November 1963, the same day as writer Aldous Huxley and President John F. Kennedy, as result of
various illnesses.
Sci-fi
master Arthur C. Clarke
regards Lewis' two books "Out of the Silent Planet" and "Perelandra" as "two of the very few works of
space fiction that can be classed as literature."
His
speech patterns, and some aspects of his personalities, were the basis for the
character of Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
(2002)
As
with what happened to J.K. Rowling
with her Harry Potter series, "The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe", the first book of C.S. Lewis' seven-book series "The
Chronicles of Narnia", suffered an alteration
made by American publishers. The book features a wolf named Maugrim,
whose name was changed to Fenris Ulf in the American
publication. The sixth book of the series is entitled "The Magician's
Nephew", and tells how the Land of Narnia was
created and discovered by Professor Digory Kirke when he was a boy.
His
life and work seem to have attracted the attention of both of the actors who
have played Hannibal Lecter. Lewis was played by Anthony Hopkins in Shadowlands
(1993), and his character Aslan was to be voiced by Brian Cox in The Chronicles of Narnia: The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) before the filmmakers
changed their minds and replaced Cox with Liam Neeson.
He
based Ransom, the main character in two of the works in his Perlandra
trilogy, after his friend J.R.R. Tolkien.
Fought for the British in World War I.
Is
portrayed by Joss Ackland
in Shadowlands
(1985) (TV) and Anthony Hopkins
in Shadowlands
(1993).
When
he married Joy Gresham, she had already been married to and divorced from her
first husband, Bill Gresham. Lewis adopted the Greshams'
two sons, David and Douglas, and made them the heirs to his estate, including
the royalties to the Narnia books.
For
many years, the Narnia books were read in the same
order in which they were written and published: 1. The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe (1950) 2. Prince Caspian (1951) 3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) 4.
The Silver Chair (1953) 5. The Horse
and His Boy (1954) 6. The Magician's Nephew (1955) 7.
The Last Battle (1956) In recent years, the books'
publishers have reordered them so that the stories take place in a more
chronological order: 1. The Magician's Nephew 2. The Lion the
Witch and the Wardrobe 3. The Horse and His Boy 4.
Prince Caspian 5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
6. The Silver Chair 7. The Last Battle The "correct" order in which one should read The Chronicals of Narnia is a subject
of fierce debate, with both orders having their defenders and attackers.
C.S.
Lewis wrote 'The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe' for
his Goddaughter, Lucy.
He
allegedly declined British knighthood for his services to literature.
Personal
Quotes
"All
that is not eternal is eternally out of date."
[Written
on his wife's tombstone] Here the whole world (stars, water, air, And field,
and forest, as they were Reflected in a single mind) Like cast off clothes was
left behind In ashes yet with hope that she, Re-born from holy poverty, In
Lenten lands, hereafter may Resume them on her Easter Day.
In
arguing against Him, you are arguing against the very power that makes you able
to argue at all.
Christ
died for men precisely because they were not worth it; to make them worth it
A
man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a
great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who
says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your
choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something
worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him
Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being
a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. -
from Mere Christianity
Some
people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something
about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument,
then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group
I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out
'allegories' to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in
that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a
sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about
them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.
If
Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same
way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] represents
despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an
invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become
like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He
chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has
done in ours?' This is not allegory at all.
I'm
more Welsh than anything, and for more than anything else in my ancestry I'm
grateful that on my father's side I'm descended from a practical Welsh farmer.
To that link with the soil I owe whatever measure of physical energy and
stability I have. Without it I should have turned into a hopeless neurotic.
Copyright © 1990-2008 IMDb.com, Inc.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0507000/bio
Academic
year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Gemma Verdú Trescolí
vertres@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press