Hollywood scriptwriter and novelist

Born: August 12, 1931;

Died: November 16, 2018

WILLIAM Goldman, who has died aged 87, was a celebrated screenwriter who won Academy Awards for two of his earliest films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men

Later, he wrote screenplays for such films as the Second World War epic, A Bridge Too Far; Misery, from a Stephen King story; Marathon Man. and The Princess Bride, the last two of which were based on his own novels.

He was also famous for his 1983 memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, in which he made the acerbic observation of Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.”

Among the writers and actors who paid tribute to Goldman were Bryan Cranston, who described him as a truly amazing screen writer. Christopher McQuarrie said, “He simply did it better than anyone. More than once”, and Ron Howard said Goldman was one of the greatest most successful screenwriters ever.

Goldman was born in Highland Park, Illinois, to Maurice and Marion Goldman, and became obsessed with films as a child.

After studying (and failing to make much of an impact) at Oberlin College in Ohio, and following a spell in the military, he graduated with a master’s degree from Columbia University, whereupon he began to write his first novel. It was published, as were four others. One of them was read by the actor Cliff Robertson, who asked Goldman to write a screenplay adaptation of a novel by another author. Robertson disliked the subsequent screenplay and dismissed Goldman, but the episode gave Goldman an entree into Hollywood; he co-wrote a 1965 film, Masquerade, and adapted a novel for a Paul Newman film, The Moving Target, the following year.

Goldman wrote the screenplay for Butch Cassidy, a hugely popular revisionist western, and the result of considerable personal research, while teaching creative writing at Princeton University.

When the film was released in 1969, starring Newman as Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid, it became one of the most popular films of the decade, and won four Oscars, including Best Original Screenplay.

Goldman lent his expertise to All the President’s Men, the story of how two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (played by Redford and Dustin Hoffman) embarked on the protracted and complicated Watergate investigation that would help bring down President Nixon.

“It’s very hard today to try to explain to the audience the pressure I think we all felt,” Goldman said many years later. “This was an important story for all of us. You very rarely get a shot at something that might be wonderful.”

The project had been initiated by Redford, and he and Goldman are said to have argued during the shoot. Though Goldman won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, the film is not one of his favourites. As he once wrote: “If you were to ask me, ‘What would you change if you had your movie life to live over?’ I’d tell you that I’d have written exactly the screenplays I’ve written. Only I wouldn’t have come near All the President’s Men.”

His next adaptation, for the war epic The Longest Day, which was said by many critics to be too long.

He had considerable success, however, in 1987 with the fantasy adventure-comedy, The Princess Bride, adapted from his own novel. Other films for which he wrote the screenplay included The Stepford Wives. Marathon Man (starring Hoffman and Laurence Olivier), Magic (starring Anthony Hopkins), Misery, and the White House conspiracy thriller, Absolute Power.

He was credited as one of the writers on Chaplin, but denied suggestions that he had written the Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting.

In 2009 the film writer Joe Queenan began an article on Goodman, prompted by the latter’s forthcoming appearance on The South Bank Show, by describing him as the world's greatest and most famous living screenwriter.

He told Queenan that he had never taken his success for granted: “I was so programmed to fail. I had shown no signs of talent as a young man. I was an editor at the school literary magazine at Oberlin College, and I would anonymously submit my short stories. When the other editors - two brilliant girls - would read them, they would say, 'We can't possibly publish this s***.’ And I would agree. After that I took a creative-writing course, where I got horrible grades. Do you know what it's like to want to be a writer and get the worst grades in the class? It's terrible.”

In the same interview he referred to his mantra that “nobody knows anything.”

“No-one has the least idea what is going to work," he said. "The minute people start acting like they know everything, we're all in trouble. Nobody thought Taken would do $100m. Nobody thought Liam Neeson would make it as an action star at this stage in his career. I heard a story that Slumdog Millionaire was going to go directly to DVD. I would have loved to have been in the room when that decision was made.”

William Goldman is survived by his partner, Susan Burden, a daughter, Jenny Goldman, and a grandson.

RUSSELL LEADBETTER