Peter Graham (writer)

Peter John Graham (8 December 1939 – 6 July 2020) was a British writer, restaurant critic, translator and filmmaker based in France. He was the author of several books about film and about food, including A Dictionary of the Cinema (1964), The French New Wave (1968) and Mourjou: The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village (1998), which recounted the culinary life of the remote French village in which he lived for more than four decades.

Early life

Graham was born on 8 December 1939 in Newbury, Berkshire, and grew up in London with his parents (Richard, an advertising copywriter, and Anne, née Scratchley, previously a ballet dancer) and sister Elizabeth. The seeds of Graham's love of France and film were sown early: his parents were keen Francophiles and his godmother a French film producer through whom he landed a role as an English schoolboy in Pierre Billon's feature film Au revoir M. Grock (1949).

University years

Graham was educated at University College School, Hampstead, and King's College, Cambridge, where alongside a degree in French and classics he pursued his involvement in cinema by contributing reviews to Granta (of which he was editor in 1961–62), Cambridge Opinion, and other publications. In 1963 he published a vitriolic pamphlet on contemporary British cinema, The Abortive Renaissance: Why Are Good British Films So Bad?. At Cambridge, too, he made the first of his three short firms, A Shilling Life (1962–63), a fascinating document on early 1960s student life, featuring a cameo by future filmmaker Stephen Frears.

Life in France: filmmaking, writing, translating

Graham moved to Paris in 1962, working as an English teacher and freelance translator. From the early 1970s to 2008, he worked for The Guardian Weekly, translating articles from Le Monde on a wide variety of subjects for a regular section in the paper. Throughout his life, he also translated several books on a range of topics, from film to food and psychoanalysis.