AustLit

This version of Chambers' play made it to Australian screens some two years after it was originally produced, where it was advertised in Australian newspapers as 'by the one Australian who, as a dramatist, has achieved international fame' (Sunday Times, 9 April 1916, p.6).

This was the second of two adaptations of C. Haddon Chambers' play to be produced in the USA in 1914.

Also produced in 1914 was this adaptation of Captain Swift, which, though sub-titled a 'comedy drama', does involve both bushrangers and suicide, neither of which are particularly comic subjects.

A later adaption of Captain Swift, this one appeared in 1920.

The first film version of Haddon Chambers's play Passers By was scripted by the incredibly prolific Stanner E.V. Taylor, who scripted over 100 films between 1908 and 1929.

This second adaptation of Passers By was widely distributed, with elaborate, melodramatic posters.

Unusually for C. Haddon Chambers, this work was only adapted once.

Already deeply melodramatic on the stage, Haddon Chambers's play was adapted into an even more melodramatic film.

The original for this film was written by E. L. Grant Watson, an Englishman who fell in love with the Australian bush during long scientific expeditions in the north-west; he set the novel on which this film was based in Western Australia.

Unusually in this list, the author behind this film's source material was a woman: Edith Lyttleton wrote 'manly', colonial literature under the ambiguous pseudonym G. B. Lancaster, including the 1910 novel Jim of the Ranges, on which this film was based. It was directed by pioneering director John Ford.

Another G.B. Lancaster novel inspired this film, but this time set in the islands of the Pacific.

Based on yet another G.B. Lancaster novel, The Eternal Struggle is set in North Vancouver, and was written while the novelist was living in the UK.

Dale Collins was another regularly adapted Australian novelist; this one began life as his novel The Sentimentalists.

Another Dale Collins novel was the basis for this film, this time Ordeal : A Novel.

Based on the debut novel from prolific romance novelist Maysie Greig, The Love Gamble was written by husband-and-wife writing team Frederick and Fanny Hatton.

Starring Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum, this film was based on a novel by Tasmanian-born Charles Shaw. It netted Deborah Kerr an Oscar nomination for best actress.

Perhaps the most famous Australian adaptation of all: P. L. Travers' novel was given the full blockbuster Hollywood treatment in this perennially popular film.

Starring Shelley Winters and Sidney Poitier, this film, which garnered a range of award nominations and wins, was based on Elizabeth Kata's Be Ready with Bells and Drums; Kata was born in Australia to Scottish parents, and later married into a Japanese family and moved to Tokyo.

Made for MGM, this adaptation starred Anthony Quinn, Laurence Olivier, and John Gielgud, as well as Australian Leo McKern.

Perhaps the best known example, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Thomas Keneally's novel Schindler's Ark won seven of the twelve Oscars for which it was nominated, including Best Adapted Screenplay.

Adapted by Australian-born, US-based script-writer from Markus Zusak's most successful novel, The Book Thief, like Schindler's List, was set in Germany during World War II.

The popular Australian television series starring Richard Roxborough as the charming but morally flexible protagonist was not a success when adapted for American audiences with Greg Kinnear in the lead role.

After being adapted to Australian television, The Slap was adapted for American audiences, with Melissa George reprising her role as the mother of the child at the centre of the scandal.

Adapted by television powerhouse David E. Kelley, series one of Big Little Lies moved the novel's action to California. The program was later extended to a second series, which developed original material.

Kelley later announced an adaptation of another Liane Moriarty novel, Nine Perfect Strangers.

The first adaptation that he penned in the United States was this television version of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage.

Of Human Bondage was rapidly followed by this version of Jane Eyre, starring a very young Charlton Heston.

The first of two scripts that Sumner Locke Elliott adapted from Louisa May Alcott's novel, this one aired on 18 December 1950.

The second of Elliott's adaptations of Alcott's work, this followed its predecessor by exactly a week, airing on Christmas Day, 1950.

The Willow Cabin, which would become English novelist Pamela Frankau's best-known work, was only published the year before Elliott wrote this adaptation for Studio One.

This adaptation was based on a novella by American writer Henry James.

Another contemporary adaptation, so contemporary that Mary Sarton's original novel and Sumner Locke Elliott's adaptation were both released in 1950.

In 1952, Studio One aired Sumner Locke Elliott's adaptation of Frank Baker's Miss Hargreaves: A Fantasy.

Sumner Locke Elliott's adaptation of John Dickson Carr's swashbuckling time-travel fantasy was broadcast on Studio One in 1952, the year after the novel was published.

With his shift from CBS to NBC, Sumner Locke Elliott had the chance to explore a different type of adaptation: adapting films for television broadcast. This version of the 1946 film The Chase (itself an adaptation of the 1944 novel The Black Path of Fear) was his first incursion into a specialised form of adaptation.

Buy Me Blue Ribbons is unusual among Sumner Locke Elliott's adaptations, because the source material is his own play, Buy Me Blue Ribbons : Comedy in Three Acts.

Sumner Locke Elliott's adaptation of Clare Boothe Luce's play for an ensemble of women was broadcast in 1955.

Sumner Locke Elliott's adaptation of Peter Pan received the highest ratings for a single television program in television history to that date, as well as receiving critical acclaim.

In 1958, Sumner Locke Elliott scripted this adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's adventure novel.

Sumner Locke Elliott adapted this script from Terence Rattigan's play of the same name, itself based on real events.

Based on Elizabeth Ferrars' 1956 novel Never Say Die, this was a tale of greedy heirs, sinister gardeners, and missing aunts. The work was an early outing for director Paul Bogart, who went on to win five Emmys during a very long career.

Another adaptation of a film for television, Notorious saw Sumner Locke Elliott adapting the work of the 'Shakespeare of Hollywood', Ben Hecht.

The second of Sumner Locke Elliott's two adaptations of Ben Hecht's film scripts.

One of Sumner Locke Elliott's adaptations was this version of Anthony Hope's Ruritanian romance.

This early television adaptation of Dion Titheradge's play was not popular with the reviewer at The Times, who felt that it limited itself too narrowly to the imagined proscenium arch: 'we should have liked to have got out of the inn parlour now and then during the 75-minute run of the play, and so have escaped from the limitations of the theatre'.

Alec Coppel adapted his own successful play for this BBC television version.

This adaptation of Ethel Turner's novel was telecast in April and May of 1953.

Like Coppel, Peter Kenna adapted his own play (itself written only three years previously) for this BBC version.

This version of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (which may have been adapted by Ray Lawler himself) was written for the BBC's Thursday Theatre anthology series.

Patrick White made it to the BBC with this Jonquil Antony adaptation of A Cheery Soul for the anthology series The Wednesday Play.

A third anthology series—Thirty-Minute Theatre—was the vehicle for this adaptation of Pat Flower's play about a secretary who realises, as she is taking dictation for a writer's latest thriller, that she is the main character.

Peter Yeldham wrote this six-part series about three confidence tricksters based on his own play of the same name.

An adaptation of L.P. Hartley's novel The Shrimp and the Anemone, this was one of Seymour's earliest adaptations for the BBC.

Alan Seymour's large-scale adaptation covered four of Antonia White's semi-biographical novels, from Frost in May in 1933 to Beyond the Glass in 1954.

Seymour's adaptation of John Masefield's fantasy novel won a BAFTA Award for Best Children's Programme (Entertainment/Drama).

The first of Alan Seymour's adaptations of C.S. Lewis's classic fantasy novels, this marked the BBC's second major adaptation of Lewis (after a ten-part 1967 television serial, now lost). The Chronicles of Narnia series as a whole was later nominated for multiple Emmy Awards and BAFTAs.

The relatively slight Prince Caspian made only two episodes of this series, followed by its sequel, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

This adaptation (for an ITV franchise) of a novel by British spy novelist Eric Ambler made a bit of a change from classic children's fantasy.

The final adaptation for the BBC's Chronicles of Narnia series was the sixth of Lewis's seven novels: The Last Battle never made it to the screen.

Seymour adapted some of Catherine Cookson's grim novels of the industrial north for an ITV franchise in the north east of England, including this adaptation of The Cinder Path.

Another adaptation of a Catherine Cookson novel.

The Wingless Bird was Seymour's last adaptation for British television, before he returned to work for Australian television.

First broadcast on the ABC in 1940, two different versions of this were produced on BBC radio: one in 1945 and one in 1946. Afford himself later adapted it into a short story, 'The Vanishing Trick'.

This is only one of eight adaptations of Alec Coppel's original stage play. The play was first produced in 1938, and continued to be adapted, including for Belgian television and by Coppel himself as a novel, for the next twenty years.

This fantasy radio play was first produced on the ABC in 1939. Ten years later, the BBC produced a version, which it broadcast on the Home Service as the Saturday Matinee.

Fergus Hume's crime novel had already been adapted once in the UK, as a film in 1915 (with an Eliot Stannard script). This adaptation, by a British script-writer, was the first of two BBC radio adaptations of this work.

Rex Rienits became perhaps Australia's most prolific export when he began working for the BBC in the 1950s. (His only close rival in terms of sheer output was Peter Yeldham.) And the first work he wrote for the BBC was this large-scale adaptation of Boldrewood's novel, produced with an almost entirely ex-pat Australian cast.

This 1958 adaptation of Hume's novel, the BBC's second, was written by Bruce Stewart, a New Zealand-Australian writer.

In 1975, the BBC began running a series called The New Australian Drama, which was a series of radio adaptations of Australian plays, the first of which was this adaptation of Peter Kenna's A Hard God.

The BBC followed A Hard God with this adaptation of Jim McNeil's prisoner drama.

The third in the BBC's series of new Australian drama was this radio version of Ron Blair's comic musical.

Jack Hibberd's play, adapted here for BBC radio, centred on the isolation of one human figure against the vastness of the Australian outback.

The Chapel Perilous doesn't seem to lend itself to a radio version, but the BBC selected it as the penultimate instalment of its New Australian Drama series.

The final instalment in the BBC's New Australian Drama series was this radio adaptation of Alex Buzo's The Front Room Boys.

Relu's family know that he is a taxi driver. They don't know that he is also an enforcer for a small-time gangster.

This Romanian series was based on the Australian television series Small Time Gangster.

La Vedova X is an Italian and French co-production, based on a novel by Susan Yorke.

This Italian telemovie was based on Pat Flower's The Tape Recorder, which was also adapted for production in the UK and the US.

Solo un Padre is an Italian production (co-produced by Cattleya and Warner Bros Italia) based on Nick Earls's novel Perfect Skin, about a dermatologist who finds himself a single father.

This Czech production is an adaptation of Alan Marshall's autobiographical story of childhood, I Can Jump Puddles.

This adaptation of Hugh Hastings's play, Seagulls Over Sorrento, was made for West German television.

West German television was also the target for this adaptation of Alec Coppel's The Gazebo, an oft-adapted work.

A co-production between West Germany and the UK, The Second Victory was an adaptation of Morris West's novel The Backlash, about the murder of a British officer's driver.

Die ene Dag is a Dutch television production of Alan Seymour's play The One Day of the Year.

Belgian television viewers were the target of this adaptation of the prolific Alec Coppel's I Killed the Count.

Another adaptation of Hugh Hastings's play, this one was filmed in Swedish and broadcast in Finland.

A second adaptation of The Gazebo, this one based on Claude Magnier's French adaptation.

Claude Magnier's French adaptation was also the basis for this television production, made some twenty-four years later.

Just as Prisoner was successful overseas on its original run, so the re-booted version, Wentworth, is proving popular with Dutch audiences, with this home-grown remake.

Starting in 2014, German television began adapting Michael Robotham novels as telemovies, under the umbrella title Neben Der Spur. As of January 2021, seven novels had been adapted for the series.

Short-lived at only 37 episodes, this was a German adaptation of Australian soap opera E Street.

Created by Reg Watson and taking its inspiration from Australian soap opera Sons and Daughters, this series soon turned into its own powerhouse German glam series, running for over 4000 episodes.

Following in the footsteps of the Dutch, who had already begun their own variant, this German program, which began in 1992 and had run for over 900 episodes by early 2021, was based on The Restless Years, although it diverged from its Australian parent's storylines after 200-odd episodes.

Two years before the German variant, this Dutch adaptation of The Restless Years hit the airwaves: it was still running thirty years later in 2020.

This Russian adaptation of a James Aldridge short story sees a young boy struggling to save his father, who has been badly mauled by a shark.

Ivan Goff (born in Perth, from which he—in his own version—hurriedly fled in his teens, by stowing away on a ship) and his long-time American collaborator, Ben Roberts, wrote the play Portrait in Black, which was frequently adapted, including for this Turkish production.

Goff and Roberts, of course, went on to create Charlie's Angels.

Australian children's texts can be quite popular in Japan, and this anime version of Deltora Quest was so popular, they added a new season with all new storylines once they'd run out of books to base it on.

Lucy of the Southern Rainbow is also anime, based on the 1982 children's novel Southern Rainbow.

This Korean film is based on Mark McShane's novel Seance on a Wet Afternoon, but puts its own supernatural, K-horror spin on the story.

A production shared between the US, Hong Kong, and the former Yugoslavia, High Road to China was a rollicking action-romance film based on Jon Cleary's novel High Road to China—at least in name. Indeed, little but the name survived the adaptation process in this case.

Taking the action and the glorious frocks to Shanghai in the 1920s, this spectacular series is a remake of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, based on the Kerry Greenwood novels.