Ray Connolly
Ray Connolly is an English writer. He is best known for his journalism and for writing the screenplays for the films That'll Be the Day and the sequel Stardust, for which he won a Writers Guild of Great Britain best screenplay award.
Early life
Ray Connolly was born and brought up in Lancashire. He was educated at West Park Catholic Grammar School, St. Helens, Ormskirk Grammar School and the London School of Economics where he read social anthropology. There he also edited the LSE magazine Clare Market Review and was an associate editor of the student film magazine Motion.
Career
After entering journalism as a graduate trainee at the Liverpool Daily Post, Connolly then moved to the London Evening Standard where he interviewed, among others, many Sixties and Seventies rock stars and cultural icons, including the Beatles, Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley. Many of his interviews with the Beatles are collected in his eBook The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive, while other interviews are collected in Stardust Memories - Talking About My Generation. He was due to interview John Lennon on the day the ex-Beatle was murdered, an event he wrote about in the BBC radio play Unimaginable''. In addition to the biography John Lennon 1940-1980, he wrote the introduction to The Beatles Complete songbook.
