The Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist William Goldman, best known for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, has died aged 87.
In 1973 Goldman published The Princess Bride, a meta-textual comedy-romance, followed by Marathon Man in 1974; the latter was made into a hit film two years later – notorious for its dentist-torture sequence – but it took until 1987, after a chequered production history, for The Princess Bride to get there.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was another hit for Newman in 1969, was Goldman’s first original film script.
Goldman’s career revived in the late 1980s as The Princess Bride film got off the ground, and he won further acclaim with the screenplay for Misery, an adaptation of the Stephen King novel about an obsessive fan.