Twelve years ago Robert Bolt, right,...

It was 12 years ago when Robert Bolt, a big, bearlike man full of life and wit and terrific conversation, was cut down in his prime by a severe stroke. Bolt, one of the most lauded screenwriters in film history, was left paralyzed down the right side of his body, and could not walk or talk for two years. Since then his life has been a long, gradual process of recovery.

He still has problems in articulating, but his mind never stopped ticking. Immediately after his stroke, Bolt replaced his typewriter with a word processor and taught himself to tap out screenplays with his left hand. Even before regaining his powers of speech he completed a rewrite of his script “The Mission,” no small feat even for a healthy writer.

That film returned to a common thread in Bolt’s work, which is littered with characters wrestling with moral dilemmas, weighing pragmatism against ethics. But the next script of his that audiences will see strikes even closer to Bolt’s preoccupations.

“Without Warning: The James Brady Story,” which airs on HBO next Sunday, tells of President Reagan’s press secretary, who was severely wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on the President by John Hinckley. After being shot, Brady underwent brain surgery and was left paralyzed. His speech was impaired and he was initially confined to a wheelchair. Parallels between Brady’s condition and Bolt’s post-stroke convalescence are remarkably close.

Bolt was persuaded to write Brady’s story by his friend David Puttnam, the former Columbia studio head now back in Britain as an independent producer. Puttnam had bought the rights to a biography of Brady, “Thumbs Up” by Mollie Dickenson, and felt it might be therapeutic for Bolt to write about someone in a condition comparable to his own.

But Bolt initially found the theme uncomfortable to tackle. “At first I said no, because it was very much like my story when I had my stroke,” he said. “Brady didn’t realize that he was finished, that he couldn’t do the old stuff he used to do for President Reagan, which was obvious to everybody else. The story is his determination to overcome, but the awful thing was to realize he would never be the same man again.

“So I said to David--no way am I going to do that. And he said, ‘That’s a pity, because I won’t do it unless you do it.’ He went out on a limb to do that.” So it was that Bolt started work, and found himself contemplating his own life after having been struck down also without warning.

It is tempting to see this 12-year recovery span as the third act of Bolt’s life, in light of his achievements before it. Act I would deal with three decades: his birth in Manchester 66 years ago, his upbringing in a strict Methodist family, service as an officer in the Royal Air Force, then after the war his enlistment in the Communist Party, his fierce atheism and a spell as a gifted teacher at Millfield, one of Britain’s pre-eminent schools.

Act II would cover his rise as a writer: radio plays for the BBC, a West End hit with the Chekhov-inspired “Flowering Cherry,” swiftly followed by a dramatized life of Henry VIII’s principled chancellor Sir Thomas More, “A Man for All Seasons,” which established him as a major British playwright. He wrote the script for the movie of “A Man for All Seasons,” and also for the epic David Lean films “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago.” He picked up two Oscars and an Oscar nomination for these, his first three screenplays; no writer in Hollywood ever made a more extraordinary debut.

These days, Bolt lives in a breathtaking, half-timbered manor house, part of which dates from the 12th Century, in this Sussex village 50 miles south of London with his wife, the actress Sarah Miles. Here he awaits writing assignments; by his own admission he is a hired gun. He doesn’t suggest ideas himself and he doesn’t come cheap. “The first thing I always ask is--how much will you pay me?” he says. “There have only been two films for which I feel I’ve been paid properly.”

You walk up the drive, passing Bolt’s blue Mercedes 300 TE with a “disabled” sticker on the window, and go in to see him in his writing room. He sits regally on a swivel chair atop a large circle of wood, his word processor and papers on a desk that surrounds him on three sides. He extends his left hand in greeting, and courteously insists that you interrupt him if he is unclear. He pronounces each word singly and with care, placing equal emphasis on every one. The effect is not unlike hearing a phone number enunciated electronically when you call for information.

Bolt immediately puts you at ease about his speech limitations. He invites you to finish his sentences, rewarding you with “Superb!” or “Gooood!” or (in a gesture he has copied from Brady) a silent thumbs-up if you decipher an unusual word. He often expresses his failure to convey words with a good-natured Americanized version of “bloody hell!” He embraces the phrase like a talisman; for a time, after his stroke, it was all he could say.

His sense of humor has remained; here in his swivel chair, he positively twinkles. He tells of meeting Brady, whom he liked enormously, at his house in Virginia; with their respective speech problems, he says dryly, “We must have made a funny pair.”

He’s even better on Brady taking him to the White House to meet President Reagan. “There we both were, trying to talk, and there was Reagan,” here Bolt cups his ear, “going: ‘What’s that?’ It didn’t make for the best conversation.”

Bolt, now a repentant ex-Communist, still clings fast to socialist ideals, and cares little for Reagan: “I think it’s obvious what I think of his politics from the script.” In early scenes, Brady is shown covering up for Reagan’s verbal public blunders; after he is shot, he opposes handgun control because Reagan opposed it.

Had the Reagan Administration taken sufficient care of Brady? “Hoo-hoo!” shouts Bolt. “Wait a minute! Should I answer that?” A long pause. “When it first happened, they were good with him.” Financially, he adds, Brady was looked after. “But as time went by, they brushed him aside, they weren’t so good. He went to the opening of a new library and Reagan didn’t acknowledge him, just passed right by. He was surprised, but only a little. Reagan just didn’t notice people.

“But this story isn’t eaten up by Reagan. Brady’s friends, they disappeared too. His political friends, that is.”

Well, you say, it’s a dirty business, politics.

The answer comes back at you with uncharacteristic speed. “ Life is a dirty business,” says Robert Bolt.

Considering the hand life has dealt him, his reaction is no surprise. Its dizzying heights have been balanced by devastating setbacks quite apart from his stroke. His relationships have generally been stormy; Bolt has wed four times, to Sarah Miles on the second and last occasions. (First time round, their marriage lasted nine years, ending in 1976.)

Fatherhood has provided its share of heartbreak; his elder daughter, by his first wife, committed suicide. “It was a long time ago,” he says. “It’s OK now, but I would like to get hold of her, shake her and say-- why? “ Some five years ago Tom, his son with Sarah, became addicted to heroin. They stayed with him in Minneapolis for family therapy; during Tom’s treatment, they renewed their relationship and remarried quietly in 1988.

For all this turbulence, there is something life-affirming about him; he radiates an air that hints at the dynamo he must have been before his stroke. Back then, he was angry, passionate, argumentative and ferociously eloquent. “It seemed he was always in mid-sentence,” says Miles.

Bolt used to throw himself into causes. Midway through writing “Lawrence of Arabia” for producer Sam Spiegel in 1961, he went on a march in London protesting nuclear weapons, lay down in the street as a gesture of civil disobedience, refused to sign a court order promising to keep the peace and was jailed for a month. Spiegel, beside himself at the prospect of delaying the movie, arrived at the jail and persuaded Bolt to agree to authorities he would behave. Bolt’s dilemma was like Thomas More’s in “A Man for All Seasons,” but unlike More he relented under pressure; for years he agonized over the incident and whether he had sold out his ideals.

This lusty approach to life often made him hard to tolerate; David Puttnam remembers that before his stroke, Bolt “could be brusque and demanding.” He had severed his ties with communism in the late ‘60s, when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, then seemed to go through a low period in his life. “Lady Caroline Lamb,” his one directing effort, which he wrote for Miles, bombed badly; he took to chain-smoking and drink, and became immensely overweight.

In retrospect, what happened seemed predestined. Bolt was in the South Pacific, working on “Mutiny on the Bounty” for Lean, and fell ill. He was flown back to Los Angeles for an emergency heart bypass operation and suffered his stroke the next day. “He wasn’t supposed to come back from it,” says Miles, during a walk around the manor house’s conservatory. “It’s absolutely miraculous he’s still here.”

Though he was initially a vegetable, Bolt gradually clawed his way back. His other son, Ben Bolt, who directed several episodes of “Hill Street Blues,” suggested the word processor, which proved a lifesaver. Physiotherapists and speech therapists helped his recovery. He learned to swim and later had his car adapted so he could drive. Miles visited him in the hospital almost daily, though when he came out he married someone else--almost perversely, it seems. This third marriage to Ann Zane, Marchioness of Queensberry, was short-lived.

Now, it is unanimously agreed, Bolt is a different person--lying in silence for almost two years wrought profound changes. “He’s a much kindlier man,” says Puttnam. “These days I find him far more considerate than he used to be.” Bolt also sees the difference. “Now I listen to people who are trying to tell me something,” he says. “Before it was--no, no, you listen to me!”

Has he found anything positive from the experience? “Ohhh!” says Bolt. “Humility! Humility! I can’t even get to my car unless someone helps me. And I feel it’s just so nice of anyone else to help me.”

Miles enters as the conversation turns to the arts documentary series “The South Bank Show” episode that last year profiled Bolt’s work with David Lean. This was Bolt’s first public attempt at speech since his stroke. It was feared he would be incomprehensible, but he triumphed. “I’ve always said your knowledge is less important than your spirit,” Miles says, “and your spirit really shone through.” Later in the conservatory she says: “Robert’s a miracle, and living with a miracle is quite a turn-on.”

Puttnam even thinks Bolt’s writing style has changed; his tendency to write long speeches has receded. “It’s interesting that he used to be a very loquacious writer,” Puttnam notes. “The stroke made him a much more sparing writer. He’s obsessed with how much dialogue there is on the page.”

“Did he say that?” says Bolt, looking amused. “I must write and thank him. He may be right.” Does he see any difference in his own work? “Yes. The good thing now is that I see the film finished in my mind before I start. The bad thing is I don’t have the same skill with words. I used to think in paragraphs, now I think in sentences.

“I also don’t know what my opinion is on anything any more. Before the stroke, I would have told you anything about anything you asked me. Now I don’t know a thing. I don’t know now, for instance, if I believe in an afterlife. Before, I would have said certainly not.”

Is it a relief to be shed of his opinions? “It’s such a relief. Now I look at things differently. I don’t look at the socialist side of an issue, I just think, I like that man or I don’t like that man. Mind you, it comes out roughly the same.”

Apart from “The Mission” and the James Brady film, much of his work since the stroke remains unproduced. “I’ve written a script about Galileo,” he says. “And one about Scott and Amundsen, the Antarctic explorers.”

Didn’t he also write one about the Irish patriot Michael Collins?

“Ah, yes. I don’t know what happened to that. What was the name of the director?”

Michael Cimino.

“That’s the man. Yes, he fled back to America, and all of a sudden,” he snaps his fingers, “that was that. I don’t know what happened.”

Bolt wrote the screenplay for “Nostromo,” the film David Lean was working on at his death. (There are no plans at this time to produce “Nostromo” with another director.)

Both he and Lean were immensely cheered at the release of the restored version of “Lawrence of Arabia” two years ago. “I had the father and mother of all rows with Sam Spiegel over that,” Bolt says. “It was shown in its original version for two weeks, and then he made all these little cuts in it. An awful man, Sam, but a lovely man. I would never work with him again--but I used to enjoy having a meal with him.”

Touches of his old confrontational style still surface when he talks of directors: “Apart from David (Lean), too many of them have one thing they’re prone to--they think they’re the author.” On the subject of “The Mission,” he says: “I think, and please underline think , that it would have been better as I wrote it. It got twisted a little bit by the director,” Roland Joffe. He admits few movies today engage him, but adds wryly: “That may be because I’m less easily engaged.”

Still, you walk back down his drive feeling that Robert Bolt has come to some resolution about his life. The presence of Sarah Miles clearly sustains him; in writing about Brady, the coincidence did not escape Bolt that he too had a wife named Sarah who nursed and cajoled him toward recovery. Indeed, a major strand of the Brady script is that he needed someone to help him through. “Right,” says Bolt. “I mean, imagine being all on your own and then having a stroke. I think I’d rather blow my head off.”

He does not make light of his discomforts: “I wish I could get about more than I do. I can drive myself--in fact, I can drive to London. But I can only walk about 300 yards, then I have to sit down. My whole side begins to ache.

“I think of life as hard, yes. But I never wake up and think--Oh God, another day. I wake up and think--oh good, another day.”