Remembering William Goldman
Screenwriter won Academy Awards for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “All the President’s Men.”
NEW YORK — William Goldman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and Hollywood wise man who won Academy Awards for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men,” has died. He was 87.
Goldman’s daughter, Jenny, said her father died early Friday in New York due to complications from colon cancer and pneumonia. “So much of what he’s written can express who he was and what he was about,” she said, adding that the past few weeks, while Goldman was ailing, revealed just how many people considered him family.
Goldman, who also converted his novels “Marathon Man,” “Magic” and “The Princess Bride” into screenplays, penned a litany of box-office hits, was an in-demand script doctor and carved some of the most indelible phrases in cinema history into the American consciousness.
Goldman made political history by coining the phrase “follow the money” in his script for “All the President’s Men,” adapted from the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate political scandal. The film starred Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. Standing in the shadows, Hal Holbrook was the mystery man code-named Deep Throat who helped the reporters pursue the evidence. His advice, “Follow the money,” became so widely quoted that few people realized it was never said during the actual scandal.
“He was the dean of American screenwriters, and generations of filmmakers will continue to walk in the footprints he laid,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said in a statement. “He wrote so many unforgettable movies, so many thunderous novels and works of nonfiction, and while I’ll always wish he’d written one more, I’ll always be grateful for what he’s left us.”
Goldman launched his writing career after receiving a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1956. He wrote the novel “The Temple of Gold” in 10 days. Knopf agreed to publish it.
He broke through as a screenwriter in 1969 with the blockbuster “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” starring Paul Newman and Redford. Based on the exploits of the reallife “Hole in the Wall” bank robbers, the movie began a long association with Redford, who also appeared in “The Hot Rock,” “The Great Waldo Pepper” and “Indecent Proposal.”
“All the President’s Men” (1976) further enhanced Goldman’s reputation as a master screenwriter. Other notable Goldman films included “The Stepford Wives,” “A Bridge Too Far” and “Misery.” The latter, adapted from a Stephen King suspense novel, won the 1990 Oscar for Kathy Bates as lead actress.
In 1961, Goldman married Ilene Jones, a photographer, and they had two daughters, Jenny and Susanna. The couple divorced in 1991. Goldman died Friday in the home of his partner, Susan Burden.
Born in Chicago on Aug. 12, 1931, Goldman grew up in the suburb of Highland Park. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1952 and served two years in the Army.
Goldman wrote more than 20 novels, some of them under pen names. “The Princess Bride,” published in 1973, was presented as Goldman’s abridgment of an older version by “S. Morgenstern.”
Despite all his success as a screenwriter, Goldman always considered himself a novelist and didn’t rate his scripts as great artistic achievements. “A screenplay is a piece of carpentry,” he once said. “And except in the case of Ingmar Bergman, it’s not an art, it’s a craft.”