Mark Peploe, who has died aged 82, enjoyed his greatest success as a screenwriter with an Oscar for The Last Emperor (1987). It was shared with the director, Bernardo Bertolucci, who was also Peploe’s brother-in-law, having married Mark’s elder sister, Clare, in 1978.
The project drew on the memoir of the final emperor of China, Puyi, from the Qing dynasty, who was crowned in 1908 aged just three. He was exiled after the Beijing coup of 1924 and appointed by Japan as puppet emperor of Manchukuo until the end of the second world war; in later years he worked as a gardener in the botanical gardens in Beijing. The challenges for the biopic were twofold: to combine epic sweep with telling interpersonal and psychological detail, and to get the script past the Chinese censors so as to access filming locations within the Forbidden City.
