British author born in Llandaff, Glamorgan, Wales, to Norwegian parents. His father, who died when Roald Dahl was only three years old, owned a farm near Oslo. Roald Dahl received his primary education at a Derbyshire boarding school, which he hated. When he was eighteen, he dropped out and went in search of adventure. He eventually ended up working for Shell in Dar es Salaam. At the start of the Second World War, he went to Nairobi where he enrolled in the Royal Air Force, was shot down over Libya and spent some time in hospital before he was able to rejoin his regiment in Greece. He was injured again in Syria in 1942, and was reassigned as assistant air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington. This was when he began to sell his stories to newspapers and magazines. In 1953, he married the famous actress Patricia Neal, but their marriage was fraught with tragedy. Their oldest son was disabled following a road accident in New York, and the family moved to Buckinghamshire where the Dahl’s daughter died of the measles in 1962, at the age of seventeen. Dahl's wife became ill when she was expecting their fifth child in 1965. They were divorced in 1983, and Dahl married Felicity Crossland. By the end of his life he had become extremely wealthy and increasingly eccentric.