Hugh Whitemore (b. 1936 – d. 2018) was an English playwright and screenwriter. Whitemore studied for the stage at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he is now a Member of the Council. He began his writing career in British television with both original teleplays and adaptations of classic works by Charles Dickens, W. Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, and Charlotte Brontë, among others, and twice won a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award. The plots of Whitmore’s plays frequently focus on historical figures. Stevie (1977) centered on the life of English poet and novelist Stevie Smith and Pack of Lies (1983) covered events leading up to the arrest of the Krogers, two Americans spying for the Russians, in London in 1961. Whitemore’s best known work taking the form of a staged biography is Breaking the Code (1986) which is centered on Alan Turing, who was responsible for cracking the German Enigma code during World War II and resisted an adherence to the English code of sexual discretion with his homosexuality, for which he was charged with gross indecency. This work was adapted as a television film in 1996. The Best of Friends (1987), about the friendship Dame Laurentia McLachlan, the Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey in Worcestershire, shared with George Bernard Shaw and Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
