‏Nicholas Martin‏

Nicholas Martin was born and grew up in Sussex. He was raised by his mother, a nurse.He attended Brighton College, a boarding school, but struggled with authority and academia and left without qualifications. He moved to London and worked variously as: a croupier, a labourer, a bouncer and a barman. In his early twenties he worked at sea as a deck hand and as a yacht captain. Between jobs he traveled in South America where he supported the Sandinista revolution. He helped build a school in the north of the country, which was destroyed by the Contra Terrorists the day after it opened.He began writing feature pieces about his travels and contributing to British newspapers including The Sunday Times, The Guardian and various magazines. In 1988 he reported from Chile on the final days of the Pinochet regime. He met his former wife Gabriela Sepulveda, a photographer with whom he has three sons, during a press conference at the Human Rights office in Santiago. On one occasion he escaped arrest by producing a letter of introduction from the features editor of Vogue magazine, a publication much favoured by Lucia Pinochet, the wife of the dictator.In 1989 Martin returned to London to take up a place at The National Film and Television School to study scriptwriting. He graduated in 1992 and began writing for British TV. His first produced script was for the highly regarded BBC series Between the Lines, which won the BAFTA award for best series. In 1998 he wrote a total of 16 episodes of the ITV comedy drama series, Big Bad World. The show launched the careers of actors Stephen Mangan and Lucy Punch with episodes directed by Justin Chadwick (Mandela).He continued to write for British TV, regularly contributing to popular series like the Bill and Midsomer Murders, but despite several near misses, none of his feature scripts reached the screen. Demoralised, in 2004, he stopped writing all together for several years but was encouraged to return to drama by veteran producer Jonathan Powell (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy).In early 2014, producer Michael Kuhn read Martin's script Florence Foster Jenkins and optioned it the same day. Within a week, Stephen Frears had agreed to direct and within three weeks Meryl Streep signed on to play Florence. The film is due to begin shooting in May, 2015.Martin lives in Tooting, South London. He now describes himself as progressive libertarian.