Richard Curtis (born November 8, 1956), a British comedy scriptwriter, is best known for the TV series Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley and the movies Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. In 2003, he directed Love Actually, his first outing as a director.

He was the co-writer with Philip Pope of the Hee Bee Gee Bees' single "Meaningless Songs" (B-side "Posing in the Moonlight") released in 1980 to parody the style of a series of Bee Gees disco hits. Curtis later moved into the TV and film industries with a continuing gift for comedy.

He was a regular writer on the TV series Not the Nine O'Clock News, where he co-wrote many of the show's songs with Howard Goodall and numerous sketches, often in collaboration with Rowan Atkinson.

Richard Curtis is married to broadcaster Emma Freud, with whom he has two sons and a daughter.

He is also the co-founder of the charity, Comic Relief.

In 2003, he was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy.

In much of his writing, there appears a character named Bernard; examples include the eponymous hero in Bernard and the Genie (1991), Nursy in Blackadder the Second, the second groom in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and a minor character in Bridget Jones' Diary . A "Bernie" appears in Notting Hill and Love Actually. The tradition stems from Curtis' time at college, when his then-girlfriend left him for Bernard Jenkin, who later became a British MP. The Bernards are generally mild, mocking caricatures, or in the case of Nursy, female.

Campaigning

Curtis was instrumental in the setting up of both Comic Relief and of Make Poverty History

External link

• Richard Curtis fanpage, including biography