John Stanley Hawkesworth (7 December 1920 – 30 September 2003) was an English television and film producer and screenwriter, best known for his work on the period drama Upstairs, Downstairs and the Granada Television adaptation of Sherlock Holmes.
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Early life
Hawkesworth was born in London on 7 December 1920, the son of the-then Captain J. L. I. Hawkesworth, a British Army officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant general and who had fought in the First World War (1914–1918), and Helen Jane Hawkesworth (née McNaughton). He was educated at Rugby, the Sorbonne and Oxford. During the Second World War (1939–1945) he was commissioned as a second lieutenant, in 1941, into the 4th Battalion, Grenadier Guards and served with it throughout the North-West Europe Campaign of 1944–45. He left the army with the rank of captain in 1946. In the late 1940s Hawkesworth began his film career as an assistant to art director Vincent Korda working with him on The Fallen Idol (1948). He also worked on films such as The Third Man (1949), Outcast of the Islands (1951) and The Sound Barrier (1952).
Career
By the mid-1950s, Hawkesworth was an independent designer, and films he worked on included The Prisoner (1955). He soon joined Rank as a trainee producer, and qualified as an associate producer while working on the film Windom's Way (1957). For the film Tiger Bay (1959), he was the producer and wrote the screenplay with Shelley Smith. In the mid-1960s, he began to work for television, and he wrote the scripts for programmes including The Hidden Truth (1964), The Short Stories of Conan Doyle (1967) and The Gold Robbers (1969).
