Hanif Kureishi, the Oscar-nominated writer of landmark British film My Beautiful Laundrette, has revealed that he has been left without the use of his arms and legs after a taking a fall in Rome on Boxing Day (December 26).
In a series of tweets from hospital on Friday (January 6), Kureishi reported that after the fall it is “unclear whether I will ever be able to walk again, or whether I’ll ever be able to hold a pen.”
London-born Kureishi asked his Twitter followers for assistance with “voice assisted hardware and software, which will allow me to watch, write and begin work again, and continue some kind of half life.”
Known as a playwright, novelist and screenwriter with other credits including My Son the Fanatic and Le Week-end, Kureishi tweeted that feeling dizzy after taking a walk he had passed out in his apartment and “woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position, my wife on her knees beside me.”
“I believed I was dying,” he added.
An operation on his spine, he went on, has led to “minor improvements in the last few days” and “sensation and some movement in all my limbs..” He said he was in the Gemelli hospital in Rome and would “begin physio and rehabilitation as soon as possible.”
Kureishi broke into the film industry in 1985 as the writer of My Beautiful Laundrette, the Stephen Frears-directed comedy drama about an ambitious young Pakistani Briton, played by Gordon Warnecke, and his white boyfriend, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. The project was one of the first features from Working Title and an early beneficiary of backing from Channel Four and earned Kureishi original screenplay Oscar and Bafta nominations.
Kureishi wrote and directed the 1991 comedy drama London Kills Me and in 1993 adapted his own novel The Buddha of Suburbia for a BBC miniseries directed and co-written by Roger Michell, the British filmmaker who died in 2021. Michell also directed Kureishi’s later scripts for 2003’s The Mother, 2006’s Venus and 2013’s Le Week-end.
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