Personal Life
Hampton was born in Faial, Azores, to British parents Dorothy Patience (née Herrington) and Bernard Patrick Hampton, a marine telecommunications engineer for Cable & Wireless. His father's job led the family to subsequently settle in Aden and Alexandria in Egypt and later Hong Kong and Zanzibar. The Suez Crisis in 1956 necessitated that the family flee under cover of darkness, leaving their possessions behind.
After a prep school at Reigate, Hampton went to the independent boarding school Lancing College at the age of 13, where he won house colours for boxing and distinguished himself as a sergeant in the CCF. Fellow dramatist David Hare was a school contemporary; poet Harry Guest was a teacher.
In 1964 he attended New College, Oxford, as a Sacher Scholar, to study German and French and graduated with a starred First Class Degree in 1968.
Read more about this topic: Christopher Hampton
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“The historian must have ... some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“I sought the simple life that Nature yields;”
—George Crabbe (1754–1832)