I was born in Bombay in 1865, the son of a professor of architectural sculpture at the Bombay school of art. I was sent to England in 1871 to be educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho!, which later served as the setting for my novel Stalky and Co. (published in 1899). I later started to take an interest in engineering, and in 1903, I flew in the world's first powered aircraft, built by my brother and myself at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
In 1911, as the result of a drunken bet, I attached a chimp's jawbone to an ancient human skull, and buried it in some gravel in Piltdown, Sussex. It was discovered soon afterwards and thought to be one of humankind's earliest ancestors. That was a joke that got somewhat out of hand, and the hoax wasn't discovered until 1953, by which time I'd forgotten that anyone was interested.
Sometime in the late 20s, I returned from a trip to New York, where I had been doing research for a novel in my series about a bumbling young gentleman and his valet. I found that I had left a dish of jelly lying around on which I had been growing some bacteria that I was planning to study. However, a mould had grown on the jelly which had killed all the bacteria. The research I had been planning was ruined, but it occurred to me that the mould itself might be worth studying, and indeed it was. It turned out to be extremely useful in treating infections in patients, and was later marketed as penicillin.
Towards the end of 1936 I decided that I could no longer sit back and watch the atrocities that were being committed by the Fascist army in Spain, and it was time I took some part in the Civil War. Through some connections in the Independent Labour Party, I joined the militia of the P.O.U.M., one of the trade unions. I served for four months on the Aragon Front, until I was wounded. My experiences in Spain were recorded in my book Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938.
Due to my injury, I was unable to fight in the Second World War, and as a result I went into something of a decline. To cheer myself up, I spent most of the late 1940s touring around North America. I met many interesting people on my travels, and we achieved a certain notoriety, becoming known as the "beat generation". Some anecdotes from those trips can be found in my books The Town and The City (1950), and On The Road (written 1951, but not published until 1957).
I made my acting debut in Love Me Tender, released in 1956. It was a western (I appeared in one other western, Charro!, in 1960). I starred in a few more films, most notably Jailhouse Rock (1957), then decided to try directing. In 1962 I directed an adaptation of my 1958 novel Dr. No, starring Sean Connery. It was a moderately successful film, but the main character, James Bond, was made far more popular by later films directed by my good friend Cubby Broccoli. Continuing the medical theme, I directed one more film in 1964: Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
I spent the late 1960s working with NASA, and in 1969 I was privileged to be the first person ever to walk on the moon. I found the whole experience to be somewhat mystical, and when I returned I started making music. In 1970 I released my Sex Machine album. The album won critical and public acclaim, and earned me the title "Godfather of Soul". The following year, I returned briefly to the cinema to write the soundtrack for the film Shaft, (1971) for which I won an Oscar.
Soon afterwards, I decided that soul had had its day, and experimented with rock music. In 1973 I released the single Layla, under the name Derek and the Dominoes (I used a pseudonym because I didn’t want the single to sell on my reputation, but in fact everyone knew it was me). My next album, A Night at The Opera (1975), went gold, and the single Bohemian Rhapsody is the only single ever to have reached number one in three different decades.
In 1976, I returned to acting, as Fred Mumford in the children's TV series Rentaghost. I featured in 4 series of the program, until 1979. I wrote a comedy series, The Young Ones, based on my experiences at Scumbag College, and the first series was broadcast in 1982. On the strength of this, and my previous attempt at writing comedy, Dad's Army, I was approached to co-write the second series of Blackadder, a comedy whose first series had shown a certain amount of promise, but hadn't quite delivered. Blackadder turned out to be a major success, and ran to 4 series and 2 specials.
In 1990, I stood in the first round of the leadership elections for the Conservative party. I had no intention of becoming a party leader and Prime Minister, but the party needed someone to oppose Margaret Thatcher so that a serious candidate could emerge in the second round and not be seen to have disrupted party unity. I beat Mrs. Thatcher in the first round, and she resigned a week later; some say that the Conservative party has yet to recover from that devastating blow.
I then returned to novel writing, with Generation X (1991), Shampoo Planet (1992) and Life After God (1994). I had planned to stage a few little concert parties in 1998, but was forced to cancel them since they were not tax-efficient. A lot of my friends were quite disappointed with me for that, but I don't care any more. I'm spending some time away from the public eye with my new wife, Billie Piper.
That's the story of my life. If you want to know things about me now, they're here.
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