Peter Shaffer screenplay for "Equus", he was nominated for the 1977 Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar but the award went to Alvin Sargent, who wrote the screenplay for "Julia". For writing the screenplay for "Amadeus", Shaffer received both the 1984 Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the 1984 Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Shaffer was homosexual but did not write explicitly about it. His boyfriend Robert Leonard died in 1990. Shaffer died on June 6, 2016, at the age of ninety while on a trip to the south-west of Ireland. He co-wrote three detective novels with his brother Anthony Shaffer under the pseudonym "Peter Antony".
Equus (play) on 11 September 1976. It then opened at the Helen Hayes Theatre on 5 October 1976, ending on 2 October 1977, for a total of 1,209 performances. Shaffer adapted the play for a 1977 film starring Richard Burton, Peter Firth, Eileen Atkins, Colin Blakely, Joan Plowright, and Jenny Agutter, directed by Sidney Lumet. Unlike stage productions, where the horses are portrayed by human actors, often muscular men wearing tribal-style masks, Lumet did not believe this could adequately be done in a film version, concluding a degree of realism was required, "because the reality he [Alan] was being watched in was