Gaby Chiappe (born c. 1964)[1] is a British screenwriter, known for her original works: television show The Level, and the films Their Finest and Misbehaviour. Prior to developing those, she worked extensively in commissioned British television, receiving praise and accolades for some of her stories. She has also acted, at university and in a small role in Their Finest.
Early life and education
Chiappe was born in Gibraltar to Mary and William Chiappe. When she was three, the family moved to Brighton, England. Chiappe attended the Cardinal Newman Catholic School, where Mary was an English teacher and taught her daughter in the sixth form. Chiappe was then admitted to New Hall of the University of Cambridge, reading Archaeology. After her first year, she transferred to studying English Literature.[1] At Cambridge, where she met future husband Dominic Gray, she "did as much acting as possible", and wanted to continue after graduating.[1]
Career
After graduating from Cambridge, Chiappe worked in fringe theatre for a decade. To make a living, she took up various jobs during that time, including what Gibraltar Magazine summarises as "teaching English as a foreign language, selling vintage clothes in Kensington market, reviewing plays, reading scripts and doing bits of journalism".[1] As part of the theatre company Trouble and Strife she contributed to writing two plays.[1] She also unsuccessfully tried to write a novel.[2] However, she found that lifestyle unsatisfying and felt that her playwriting was not building a career. Chiappe and husband moved to Leeds in 1997. At the same time, she was offered the opportunity to write a trial script, like a writing audition, for television show Family Affairs, which a friend was working on. Chiappe got the job, and while she was writing commissioned scripts for the show, she realised that "script writing was the culmination of all that interested her".[1]
Broadly speaking, I'd say the deadlines in film are less punishing; mainly because it is in development for so long and by the time you're shooting it, it's written. In television, you're often writing to production deadlines that are tight from the start [...] but it was the one-offs that were really hard to handle as these would involve going down to London [...] especially when the children were young. [...] However, being a screenwriter does, in the main, mean that you can do your work whenever you want.
Chiappe worked on Family Affairs until 2002, in a busy work environment. After a few years as a working screenwriter, Chiappe got her first agent, Christine Glover, who had been recommended by a friend and who was still her agent in 2017.[1] Regarding writing for television, Chiappe has said that she is a slow writer and meets the industry's strict deadlines only by working at all hours.[1] From 2000 to 2015, Chiappe worked on various other soaps and television shows as a commissioned writer, and began developing her own series: The Level, which she co-created with Alex Perrin and which aired in 2016.[1]
In her last commissioned television role, writing for the Scottish drama Shetland, Chiappe and script executive Clare Batty wrote a difficult storyline about rape, which was received positively, and described as important and powerful, and not gratuitous.[3] Chiappe had worked with the organisation Rape Crisis at their HQ in Leeds to develop the storyline.[4] Chiappe and Batty were praised for their presented the subject.[3][4]
Chiappe had starting working on her first feature film screenplay, Their Finest, an adaptation from the novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, in 2008 or 2009, and it was filmed five or six years later.[a][1] She also appears in a cameo in one of the World War IIpropaganda films shown in the film.[5] In this process, Chiappe is said in Gibraltar Magazine to have "found there wasn't too big a difference between writing scripts for television and film".[1] In 2017, Chiappe was adapting another novel, Dark Matter, for screenplay.[1][2] She noted that she had more freedom to write a feature film and develop a television series as her children got older.[2]
In 2018, the Writers' Guild of Great Britain released a report it had commissioned about gender inequality in screenwriting, simultaneously launching a campaign called Equality Writes, backed by various female writers, including Chiappe, and asking for an equal split of writers by 2020.[6][7][8]
^"Writers' Guild Awards 2018". Writers' Guild of Great Britain. 5 December 2017. Archived from the original on 9 November 2020. Retrieved 8 February 2020.
