To celebrate this heartwarming film about friendship, we take a closer look at the life of Roald Dahl, who wrote the book the film is based on.
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Cardiff, Wales. His parents had emigrated from Norway. Dahl’s childhood was filled with both adventure and tragedy. Astri, Dahl’s 7-year-old sister, died of appendicitis when Dahl was 3. Just a few weeks after that, Dahl’s father died of pneumonia at just 57 years old.
Everlasting Gobstoppers
When Dahl was 8 years old, he and four friends played a prank on the owner of a local candy store. They put a dead mouse into a jar of gobstoppers (also called jawbreakers). The school headmaster beat Dahl with a cane. Never forgetting the incident, Dahl later added Everlasting Gobstoppers to his book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In 1976, Nestlé created a multilayered version of the candy with the same name.
Gloster Gladiator
Dahl became a fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force in 1939, just as World War II was looming. Flying an old-fashioned biplane called a Gloster Gladiator, Dahl crash-landed in the Libyan desert, fracturing his skull. He survived and went on to fly a more modern plane called a Hawker Hurricane in the Battle of Athens in 1941. Of the 12 planes in his squadron, five were shot down. In his book Going Solo, Dahl described the event as “an endless blur of enemy fighters whizzing towards me from every side.”
Dahl was a spy
During World War II, Dahl was recruited by the spy William Stephenson and went to Washington, D.C., to work as a diplomat. Dahl provided MI6 with information but eventually quit because he didn’t think people in Washington were taking the war seriously. “I’d just come from the war. People were getting killed. I had been flying around, seeing horrible things. Now, almost instantly, I found myself in the middle of a pre-war cocktail party in America,” he said, according to Storyteller: The Authorized Biographyof Roald Dahl by Donald Sturrock.
No pearly whites
Dahl had major dental problems and finally had all his teeth removed to spare him any further trouble. He was happy with false teeth and encouraged others to follow his advice and ditch their choppers.
He got married, then divorced
Dahl married stage and screen actress Patricia Neal in 1953. Appearing in such films as A Face in the Crowd and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Neal won an Academy Award for her performance in the film Hud with Paul Newman. She and Dahl had five children together. They divorced in 1983 after a series of tragedies.
A giant himself
Dahl said he often wrote characters based on people in his real life. The grandmother in The Witches was based on his own mother. Dahl was very tall at 6 feet 6 inches. Perhaps he felt like a giant at times and based the Big Friendly Giant on himself.
Sophie in ‘The BFG’
In 1960, Dahl and Neal’s son Theo suffered brain damage when his stroller was hit by a taxi in Manhattan. Theo eventually recovered. In 1962, their daughter Olivia died from the measles at just 7 years old. Though the lead character in The BFG is named after Dahl’s granddaughter, Sophie, the book was dedicated to Olivia.
Pro-vaccination letter
In this moving letter, Dahl urges parents to vaccinate their kids against measles — something he was unable to do for little Olivia because there was no reliable vaccine at the time.
Hated by critics
Just like the original fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, Dahl’s books are filled with violence, danger and evil adults. Critics thought books like James and the Giant Peach, in which James’ parents die a violent death, were too dark and morbid for children. But decades later, children and parents still love Dahl’s fantastical stories and menacing characters.
‘You Only Live Twice’
In the 1960s, Dahl wrote several screenplays, including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Though he adapted his book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for the screen, David Seltzer completely rewrote the script, infuriating Dahl. Dahl refused to let anyone else make films from his books while he was alive.
Charges of racism
In the original version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from 1964, the Oompa-Loompas were described as a tribe of African pygmies whom Willy Wonka collected from the very deepest, darkest part of the African jungle. In 1972, Dahl changed the Oompa-Loompas to blond-haired dwarves to skirt the controversy. In the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, they had orange skin and wore green wigs.
The Nazi connection
Shot in Munich, Germany, in 1971, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory tried to cast locals in many of the smaller roles. For the Oompa-Loompas, however, producers struggled to find any little people because Nazis killed so many of them during World War II, believing them to be genetically inferior. If you watch the film closely, you’ll also see that one of the Oompa-Loompas is a lady.
Spielberg on Sophie
Sophie is the young orphan who befriends the Big, Friendly Giant in the film. Spielberg, who has a knack for casting amazing children, said that 9-year-old Ruby Barnhill’s audition stopped him dead in his tracks: “There was just something about her… She is fascinating and incredibly talented, and just perfect for this role.” Spielberg is also incredibly fond of Sophie as a character, saying, “She is one of the strongest female characters I think I have ever had in one of my films.”
Gobblefunk
Gobblefunk is a fanciful language created by Roald Dahl to allow the BFG to express himself on his own terms. While Gobblefunk words sound similar to English words, they are purposely jumbled. Some of the fun words include frobscottle, a carbonated drink whose bubbles go downward rather than upward, crickety crackety, the sound of breaking bones, and golden phizzwizard, a glorious dream.
100th birthday
Though Roald Dahl died in 1990 of myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disease, 2016 marks his 100th birthday. Children still leave toys and flowers on his grave in England.
Ready to watch it?
The BFG opens in movie theaters today.
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