Life as an author
After a brief stint in the business world, Sabatini went to work as a writer. His first published short story, "The Red Mask," was printed in 1898, and his first novel came out in 1902. It took Sabatini roughly a quarter of a century of hard work before he attained success in 1921 with Scaramouche. The novel, an historical romance set during the French Revolution, became an international bestseller. It was followed the next year by the equally successful Captain Blood. All of his earlier books were then rushed into reprints, the most popular of which was The Sea Hawk (originally published in 1915).
Sabatini was a frequent writer who published a new book approximately every year. With his high output and well-crafted stories he was able to maintain his popularity with the reading public through the decades that followed.
In the early 1940s illness from stomach cancer forced Sabatini to slow his prolific writing. He only published three more books before his death in 1950: King in Prussia (also known as The Birth of Mischief, 1944), Turbulent Tales (a collection of short stories, 1946), and The Gamester (1949).
Personal life
Rafael Sabatini was born in Jesi, Italy, to an English mother, Anna Trafford, and Italian father, Vincenzo Sabatini. His parents were opera singers who then became teachers.
At a young age Sabatini was exposed to many languages living with his grandfather in Britain. He attended school in Portugal, and as a teenager in Switzerland. By the time he was 17, when he returned to Britain to live permanently, he had become proficient in five languages. He quickly added a sixth language – English – to his linguistic collection. He consciously chose to write in his adopted language, because, he said, "all the best stories are written in English".
In 1905, he married Ruth Goad Dixon, the daughter of a Liverpool merchant. They had a son, Sabatini's only son, Rafael-Angelo (nicknamed Binkie). He was killed in a car crash on 1 April 1927. In 1931, Sabatini and Ruth divorced. Later that year he moved from London to Clifford, Herefordshire, near Hay-on-Wye.
In 1935, he married the sculptor Christine Dixon (née Wood), his former sister-in-law - she had been married previously to Ruth's brother, Hugh Wainwright Dixon. They suffered further tragedy when Christine and Hugh's son, Lancelot Steele Dixon, was killed aged 23 in a flying accident on the day he received his RAF wings, on 9 April 1940; he flew his aeroplane over his family's house, but the plane went out of control and crashed in flames right before the observers' eyes.
Sabatini died in Switzerland 13 February 1950. He was buried in Adelboden, Switzerland. On his headstone his wife had written, "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad", the first line of Scaramouche.
Film adaptations
Sound films
Several of his novels were made into notable films in the sound era:
The 1940 film The Sea Hawk, with Errol Flynn, is not an adaptation but a wholly new story which just used his novel's title.
