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Roald Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964 and Matilda in 1988. He served as a WWII fighter pilot and survived a crash in Libya in 1940. His books earned the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and multiple Edgar Awards.
Names, aliases, and relatives of Roald Dahl — birth name, kin, and personal ties.
Roald Dahl by the numbers — life, work, and family.
Roald Dahl — early life, career, personal life, and legacy.
His father died of pneumonia when Roald was three. On September 13, 1916, he was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegian parents Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg and Harald Dahl. At Repton School in Derbyshire, which he entered at thirteen, he endured harsh hazing and corporal punishment, experiences that later fed his writings against cruelty.
His first published work was Shot Down Over Libya, based on his WWII crash in 1940. He wrote for adults after the war, but his children’s book breakthrough came with James and the Giant Peach in 1961 and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964. He wrote screenplays for You Only Live Twice in 1967 and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1968. His stories combine suspense and horror with a simple tone. He won Edgar Awards for his short stories and created the TV series Tales of the Unexpected.
He married Patricia Neal in 1953, and they had five children: Olivia, Tessa, Theo, Ophelia, and Lucy. Their daughter Olivia died of measles in 1962. In 1965, Neal suffered strokes, and he devised rehabilitation techniques that restored her speech and mobility. After their divorce in 1983, he married Liccy Dahl. His son Theo suffered a brain injury in 1960, leading him to co-invent the Wade-Dahl-Till valve for hydrocephalus.
Dahl’s books have been adapted into major films, including Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971 and Matilda in 1996. The Times described him as one of the most widely read writers of his generation. In 2012, a set of British commemorative stamps featured Quentin Blake’s illustrations from his books. He received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1983. Critics have compared fellow author Neil Gaiman to Dahl for their shared dark fantasy style. His children’s classics Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG remain his most famous works.
Browse the complete filmography of Roald Dahl — every film, TV show, and documentary credit, ranked by popularity.
Every award, honor, and recognition received by Roald Dahl — Grammys, hall-of-fame inductions, civic honors, lifetime achievements.
Roald Dahl's bibliography — every authored, edited, and co-written book, ranked by edition count.
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A wall of memorable lines from Roald Dahl — lyrics, interviews, and off-the-cuff remarks captured over a lifetime.
A Little Nonsense Now and Then Is Relished by the Wisest Men.
A Person Is a Fool to Become a Writer. His Only Compensation Is Absolute Freedom.
A Writer of Fiction Lives in Fear. Each New Day Demands New Ideas and He Can Never Be Sure Whether He Is Going to Come up with Them or Not.
My Faults and Foibles Are Legion.
I Mean, If You and I Were in a Line Moving Towards What We Knew Were Gas Chambers, I’d Rather Have a Go at Taking One of the Guards with Me; but They Were Always Submissive.
I Am Certainly Anti Israel, and I Have Become Anti Semitic.
There Is Always a Reason Why Anti Anything Crops up Anywhere; Even a Stinker Like Hitler Didn’t Just Pick on Them for No Reason.
I Just Want Someone Who Can Make Me a Cup of Tea.
If a Person Has Ugly Thoughts It Begins to Show on the Face.
Little-known facts about Roald Dahl — origins, oddities, and behind-the-scenes details from a public life.
His only son, Theo Dahl, suffered a brain injury when his baby carriage was struck by a taxi when the boy was just four months old. The most serious of his injuries was hydrocephalus, commonly known as water on the brain. Dahl got together with a pair of friends — a neurosurgeon and an engineer — and created a device called the Wade-Dahl-Till valve to alleviate cranial pressure. Theo recovered before the device was perfected, but it allowed thousands of others suffering from hydrocephalus to recover from their injuries. His book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is dedicated to Theo, who almost died.
One of his English teachers wrote in his school report that he had never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended.
After his first wife, Patricia Neal, suffered a series of strokes in 1965, he was appalled at the lack of effective rehabilitation. He designed techniques that restored her to full functionality after doctors had told him she would never recover. His techniques are now standard procedure throughout the world in the treatment of stroke victims.
He wrote two screenplays based on books by Ian Fleming: You Only Live Twice in 1967 and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1968. Fleming’s cousin, Christopher Lee, appears in the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from 2005, based on Dahl’s book. He also appears in Gremlins 2: The New Batch from 1990, which is named after a word Dahl coined.
In the company of adults, he became bored quickly.
He is credited with coining the term Gremlin during the Second World War, referring to little creatures who lived inside fighter plane engines, causing them to stall at the worst possible time.
The Helga character, Luke’s grandmother, in The Witches was based on his own Norwegian grandmother, who he said was a tough and fearless woman.
He lost the use of his eyes during World War II but regained his sight in recovery.
He wrote his novels in his garden shed.
The unauthorized biography of Dahl by Jeremy Treglown was unfavorable to him, claiming that he was a snob, selfish and rude, a serial adulterer during his marriage to Patricia Neal, ungrateful and a virulent anti-Semite. His penchant for extra-marital affairs was confirmed by Neal in a television interview after his death, but his children defended him against the majority of Treglown’s charges, and he had another champion, with reservations, in Dirk Bogarde, who played him in a TV movie and reviewed Treglown’s book unfavorably in the London Daily Telegraph, concluding famously with the words, he wasn’t really such a shit, you know.
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator has never been made into a film; he refused to sell the rights after his profound disappointment with Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971. The Magic Finger has never been made into a film either, or George’s Marvellous Medicine, but a film of The Twits is, as of this writing, in production.
He was honored by a set of British commemorative postage stamps issued 10 January 2012. The stamps feature illustrations by Quentin Blake, which were originally used in the following children’s books by Dahl: Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Twits, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and The BFG.
His short story Beware of the Dog is officially the basis for the film 36 Hours in 1964, although the plot is much altered and extended. According to one of the biographies of Dahl, the film was written without reference to him or his story, and it was only after the leading female role in the film was offered to his then wife Patricia Neal that he learned of the film. The similarity between the script and his original plot was obvious, and, with a great deal of money already invested, MGM was in no mood to be sued by Dahl for plagiarism. It quickly agreed to pay him a large sum of money for the film rights to his short story and gave him appropriate credit. Eva Marie Saint took the female lead in the film.
After his daughter Olivia died of measles, he became a vocal advocate of preventative vaccinations.
He had an interest in photography and often carried a camera around with him.
He disliked Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971, which was based upon his children’s classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He felt it made the story world too peaceful.
He allegedly declined to receive an O.B.E., Officer of the order of the British Empire, in 1986.
He is the grandfather of British model Sophie Dahl and Chloe Dahl.
His TV series Tales of the Unexpected in 1979 dramatized a selection of his short stories.
He nearly lost his nose in a car accident.
He replaced Richard Maibaum as screenwriter of You Only Live Twice in 1967 at the last minute. Maibaum returned to the chair in 1969.
He died three months after The Witches in 1990, based on his book, was released.
On a table near to his right hand, when he was sitting in his chair in his writing shed, he had collected all sorts of memorabilia; various things sent to him by fans or schoolchildren, a ball of silver paper from bars of chocolate which he had collected over the years since he was a young man and a part of his own hip bone that had been removed from him.
His parents were Norwegian.
He fathered five children, four daughters and one son with first wife, Patricia Neal: Olivia Twenty Dahl was born on Wednesday, April 20, 1955, and she died from measles on Saturday, November 17, 1962. His second daughter was born on Thursday, April 11, 1957, named Tessa Dahl. His only son was the third of five, Theo Matthew Roald Dahl was born on Saturday, July 30, 1960, aka Theo Dahl. Third daughter, Ophelia Magdalena Dahl, was born on Tuesday, May 12, 1964, aka Ophelia Dahl, and Lucy Neal Dahl was born on Wednesday, August 4, 1965, aka Lucy Dahl.
Daughter, Olivia, died of the measles at age 7.
During the last year of his life, he compiled a book of anecdotes and recipes with his wife Liccy Dahl under his regular publisher Penguin in 1996 as his Cookbook.
He flew Hawker Hurricanes in 80 Squadron in WWII.
He was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde in the made-for-TV movie The Patricia Neal Story in 1981.
His parents were Norwegian, but he was born in Llandaff, Glamorgan, in 1916 and educated at Repton School.
Dahl was badly wounded in Libya during World War II, but he served in the RAF in Greece and Syria. His book Over to You draws on those experiences and friends and colleagues to convey the bizarre reality of a pilot’s existence and the daily possibility of death.
His father died of pneumonia when Roald was 3.
The Times described Dahl as one of the most widely read writers of his generation and wrote in its obituary that children loved his stories and made him their favorite and that they will be classics of the future.
He hated facial hair and considered it untidy for a man to have a beard.
Fellow author Neil Gaiman has been likened to a Dahl for his generation, because they both wrote dark fantasies as if they were true, and they shared the ability to remind a reader of what it was like to be a child.
Roald Dahl became a student of Repton School in Derbyshire at age 13. He disliked the hazing by the older boys, the frequent beatings of younger students by their seniors, and the corporal punishment of students by the faculty. His writings as an adult often reflected his dislike for unnecessary cruelty and any type of corporal punishment.
In one of Dahl’s short stories, Beware of the Dog, a fighter pilot is shot down during wartime and loses one of his legs. He recovers in a hospital only to discover that he is in Nazi-occupied France. Although the story is based on Dahl’s WWII experiences, it is not entirely autobiographical; Dahl did crash his plane, but did not lose a leg or become a prisoner of war.
His stories are acclaimed and widely translated and have become worldwide bestsellers. One of the most successful and well known of all children’s writers, his books are read by children everywhere.
He had a bad back, which caused him to become ill-tempered.
He enjoyed drinking both whiskey and wine in the evenings.
His short story Only This may have inspired the climax of the Steven Spielberg film Always in 1989, in which Pete’s spirit guides Durinda to land a plane while in the cockpit with her.
He has written two autobiographies, Boy and Going Solo.
His story Gremlin Lore about fictitious mischievous elves that were said to cause unexplained damage on RAF planes was commissioned by Walt Disney but was never made.
His novel My Uncle Oswald was much praised and edited his Book of Ghost Stories.
The Witches won the 1983 Whitbread Award.
He used his experiences of his forced landing in North Africa during the war to write Shot Down Over Libya which was his first published work.
His WWII novel Over to You was published in a magazine in 1946 and then as a book in 1973. The stories in Over to You were published in The Saturday Evening Post, Tomorrow, Harper’s Magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal and Town and Country. Over to You doesn’t refer to anyone in particular, the pilots are not the names of people he knew, and when Dahl says I that doesn’t mean he’s talking about himself. The book was based on his wartime experiences, and he speaks with some respect for the German pilots in the book.
At the start of World War II, Dahl enlisted in the RAF at Nairobi, Kenya. He was severely wounded after joining a fighter squadron in Libya, but later saw service as a fighter pilot in Greece and Syria. In 1942 he went to Washington as Assistant Air Attaché, where he started to write, and then transferred to Intelligence, ending the war as a wing commander. His first 12 short stories, based on his wartime experiences, were originally published in leading American magazines and then as a book, Over to You, which draws on those experiences and friends and colleagues to convey the bizarre reality of a pilot’s existence and the daily possibility of death.
He wrote for adults, too.
The Royal Mint dropped plans to celebrate Dahl’s life with a commemorative coin because of concerns about his anti-Semitic views. Official papers obtained by the Guardian disclosed that the Royal Mint concluded he was not regarded as an author of the highest reputation.
Quick answers to the questions readers ask most about Roald Dahl.
Celebrities similar to Roald Dahl — same craft, ranked by reach.
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