In the glow of an Indian summer: Ronald Harwood

At 73, playwright and screenwriter Ronald Harwood has two new plays and two new films due. 'I have to pinch myself,' he tells Jasper Rees

Ronald Harwood is enjoying a remarkable Indian summer. The next few months bring a brace of new plays and a major revival.

To cinemas come two substantial new films. For one of them, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Harwood will once more be off to the Academy Awards. The last time, in 2002, he boarded the home-bound plane with a statuette for The Pianist.

"It all comes at once," he says. "I wish it didn't, but there's nothing you can do. It's just accidental. I never complain. I'm 73. I don't know how long it can go on, but I just take full advantage of it. I've just had my third Oscar nomination! At my age I find it amazing. I have to pinch myself."

We meet in the elegant environs of his ground-floor flat in Chelsea. To research and write The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, adapted from Jean-Dominique Bauby's remarkable account of being totally paralysed by a stroke, he took himself off to his Parisian apartment.

It had been several years since he'd read the book, which Bauby laboriously dictated by blinking his left eyelid as a stenographer recited the alphabet.

"I re-read it and I thought, 'I'm absolutely mad, this can't be done.' I saw the mother of his children, and the woman who took the dictation when he blinked.

The only note I made in the interview was 'alphabet like music'. And I was about to tell [the producer] that I couldn't go on, and this idea came that the camera should be him. I rationalised it afterwards. You couldn't look at him in that state for two hours."

The resulting script, which at this early stage was still in English, was offered to Johnny Depp. Writer and actor met at a première.

"He took my hand and held it warmly, and he said, 'I can't wait to start on it.' As we turned away, I said to my wife, 'He's not going to do the movie.' Absolutely blinding sincerity was the sign.

I just knew it. The bigger the star, the bigger the bulls***." The film ended up in French, with Mathieu Amalric in the lead.

Harwood knows actors, having come over from Cape Town at 17 to become one. He ended up in Donald Wolfit's company, which also contained Harold Pinter. Wolfit made him his dresser and, "when he found out I was Jewish, he made me his business manager".

He took up writing when on the dole rather than work as a builder on the Hammersmith flyover. Within a few years, Alexander Mackendrick had hired him to write the screenplay for High Wind in Jamaica.

Not every film has been a hit. After The Pianist, his close friend Roman Polanski asked him to adapt Oliver Twist. "Nobody went. I think the musical is the reason: people are waiting for the songs. But Polanski said to me, 'In 10 years' time they'll tell you it's a classic.'?"

His adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, starring Javier Bardem, is yet to be released here, but elsewhere "hasn't been well received", admits Harwood.

Is it a problem that Hispanic actors are playing Colombian characters in English? "It never bothers me, but it now bothers other people because we're so politically correct about ethnicity and those awful PC words that pop into people's heads."

Despite suddenly becoming one of the film world's top screenwriters - next up is Australia, Baz Luhrmann's Outback epic starring Nicole Kidman - Harwood is essentially a playwright whose interest has been always been pricked by the moral dilemmas thrown up by the Jewish experience of the 1930s and '40s.

"It's a world I'm haunted by," he says, "and what can you do?"

Thus Collaboration, one of his new plays, is about the pre-war relationship between Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig, the Jewish playwright who wrote the libretto for the opera Die schweigsame Frau in 1935 and seven years later committed suicide in Brazilian exile. Harwood intriguingly takes a rather dimmer view of Zweig's war record than Strauss's.

"Strauss had half-Jewish grandchildren. The Nazis used that to put pressure on him. What would you have done? It exonerates him. I think Zweig's suicide was a dreadful act with a young wife because he couldn't face the future."

It will be played in rep in Chichester this summer with Taking Sides, Harwood's account of Wilhelm Furtwängler's protection of Jewish musicians in the Berlin Philharmonic.

But before then at Watford Palace there is An English Tragedy. It tells of John Amery, the virulent English Nazi propagandist who pleaded guilty to high treason after the war and was hanged. Harwood first read about Amery 40 years ago in Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason.

"I was puzzled why he pleaded guilty. Rebecca said, 'I think he wanted to save his family embarrassment.' I said, 'He'd embarrassed them all through the war, for God's sake.

His father was a Cabinet minister and he was broadcasting from Germany.' And she shrugged me off. Rebecca didn't like to be pinned down if she didn't know the answer absolutely.

"About three or four years ago, a learned journal came through the post in which it said that Leo Amery, his father, was half-Jewish. I knew I had a play there and then. The tragedy," he adds, "is about the father who wanted to be English and thought that, if he admitted his Jewish ancestry, he would never have got on."

By the time it opens, Harwood either will or won't be back on the plane to Los Angeles for the Oscar ceremony, depending on the strike action by screenwriters seeking a fair share of internet income.

Harwood is drily optimistic that agreement will be reached ("I think the Writers Guild are having their balls squeezed") but far more certain that any settlement will make no difference to writers' income.

"I've had a piece of every picture I've ever written. I've never had a penny. David Lean said to me at a party just after The Dresser, 'Do you want to make money out of movies?' I said, 'I'd love to.'

He said, 'Go into the film studio; go and find the office where they're counting the money; you'll see men in suits on their knees stuffing money into sacks. The money they can't get in, grab, because that's all you're going to get.'

"It's the game. There is nothing you can do about it."