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".
Classic Stage Company O'Hare, and Peter Sarsgaard, and "The Seagull" with Dianne Wiest and Alan Cumming; David Ives' "The Heir Apparent", "Venus in Fur" with Nina Arianda (Broadway transfer 2011/2012, Tony Award nom., Best Play), "The School for Lies" with Hamish Linklater, and "New Jerusalem" with Richard Easton; "Unnatural Acts", conceived by Tony Speciale; Anne Carson's "An Oresteia"; and Shakespeare's "Hamlet" with Peter Sarsgaard, "The Tempest" with Mandy Patinkin, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with Bebe Neuwirth, and "Richard III", "Richard II", and "Hamlet" with Michael Cumpsty. Prominent artists who have worked at Classic Stage Company include F. Murray Abraham, Wes Bentley, Zoe Caldwell,