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Michael Gerald Hastings was a British playwright, screen-writer, and occasional novelist and poet. He is best known for his 1984 play about the poet T.S. Eliot and his wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood, Tom & Viv, which was adapted into a motion picture released in 1994.
Hastings was born in London. His early plays reflected the influence of the Angry Young Men movement and his brief involvement with the circle surrounding Colin Wilson.
He later enjoyed mainstream West End success with Gloo Joo, a farce about a West Indian threatened with deportation from the United Kingdom, which won the Evening Standard Comedy of the Year Award in 1979. He wrote numerous stage plays, television screen plays, and in addition to the Tom & Viv film, scripts for two motion pictures, The American and The Nightcomers. He also wrote two libretti for Michael Nyman, Man and Boy: Dada and Love Counts.
He published his first novel, The Game in 1957, followed by The Frauds. His 1970 novel Tussy Is Me - about Eleanor Marx - won him the "Somerset Maugham Award". A poetry collection, Love Me, Lambeth, and Other Poems appeared in 1961.
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