Christopher Hampton has the singular distinction of being the only person who ever lost a Best Play Tony and, then, won a Best Screenplay Oscar—for the same property.
This property was his particular masterpiece, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (or, as it’s still known among the movie masses, Dangerous Liaisons), and there’s a kind of poetic justice embedded in his feat. If you consider how many self-effacing literary bases he covers (adaptor, translator, opera librettist), it’s comforting to know that a writer’s original creation can occasionally, no matter how circuitously, finish first.
