John Briley obituary
When John Briley, who has died aged 94 of a blood disorder, was first approached by Richard Attenborough with the idea of turning the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi into a film, the screenwriter was sceptical about its appeal. “I was certain that no one in the Detroit of my boyhood or my adopted town in semi-rural England would want to pay to see a film about an old man who sat on a rug in a loincloth and spouted words about peace and passive resistance,” he said. There were his own career prospects to consider: “I had had one or two disasters and really didn’t want another, even a grand one.” But the mystery of the subject, and of Attenborough’s long-held enthusiasm, was unlocked for Briley once he began reading Gandhi’s letters and articles. “Gradually the personality of this open, questing, unpretentious man began to unfold for me.”
There were bumps along the way. He resisted the director’s idea of casting Ben Kingsley in the lead, for example, pushing instead for John Hurt. But the resulting script for Gandhi (1982) brought him the academy award for best original screenplay, one of eight Oscars won by that picture. In his acceptance speech, Briley thanked Attenborough for “putting up with me” and was effusive about Kingsley’s performance, describing it as “beyond dreams”. Writer and director teamed up again five years later on Cry Freedom (1987), which depicted the friendship between the journalist Donald Woods (played by Kevin Kline) and the South African activist Steve Biko (Denzel Washington), who was killed in police custody in 1977.
Briley was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the US, and raised in Detroit. He was the sixth of seven children of William, a salesman, and his wife, Stella (nee Daly), a sales assistant in a department store. He was educated at Southwestern high school, Detroit, where he wrote educational radio scripts that won him a scholarship sponsored by a local radio station. His education was interrupted by the war: he spent three years in the US air force, rising to the rank of second lieutenant before resuming his studies at the University of Michigan. One of his professors, the noted Shakespeare scholar GB Harrison, encouraged him to pursue a PhD at the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University, in the UK, where he found himself under the supervision of another literary scholar, Allardyce Nicoll.
He remained in Britain after finishing his doctorate, and began writing for television, theatre and film. The shows he had written and produced for US air force employees attracted the attention of MGM, which hired him as a staff writer. His work on the horror film Children of the Damned (1964) – a loose sequel to Village of the Damned (1960), which was itself an adaptation of John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos – brought him success, though he was unhappy with changes made by the studio to his script. The frustrations he experienced and the drastic recutting of his historical drama Pope Joan (1972), starring Liv Ullmann, led him to bemoan the lowly place of the writer in the film-making process. “Your ‘creativity’ must be exercised within boundaries set by a budget, by other people’s imaginations, by the vagaries of agents and someone else’s judgment of public taste,” he said in 1981.
Other screenplays included That Lucky Touch (1975), a romantic caper with Roger Moore and Susannah York; The Medusa Touch (1978), a preposterous but gripping psychological horror starring Richard Burton as a man compelled to cause death and disaster; and Eagle’s Wing (1979), a ruminative western with Martin Sheen and Harvey Keitel. After winning the Oscar for Gandhi, he wrote Marie (1985), starring Sissy Spacek as a woman fighting corruption in the US prison system. Thereafter he specialised in historical dramas: Tai-Pan (1986), Sandino (1991) and the unloved Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992) in which Marlon Brando gave, according to the critic Roger Ebert, his “worst performance in memory” as Torquemada.
He adapted Arthur Miller’s The Crucible for 20th Century Fox, but the playwright disliked Briley’s version and wrote his own, which was filmed in 1996. Briley also wrote several novels including The Traitors (1969), which questioned America’s involvement in Vietnam. “He’s a difficult bugger, a bit of a prima donna,” Attenborough said of him in 1987, “but the bastard’s brilliant.”
He was married, first to Dorothy Reichart; they were divorced in the early 1990s after four decades of marriage. He then married Valerie Belsky, and their marriage also ended in divorce. In 2004 he married Nancy Whitcomb (nee Helmich). She survives him, along with four children from his first marriage, Dennis, Paul, Mary and Shaun.
• John Richard Briley, screenwriter, born 25 June 1925; died 14 December 2019