Oscar-winning screenwriter Bo Goldman dies aged 90

Bo Goldman, who penned the Oscar-winning scripts for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Melvin And Howard, has died aged 90.

Goldman died on Tuesday in Helendale, California, his son-in-law, the director Todd Field, said.

No details on the cause of death were given.

It was not until Goldman was in his 40s, after years of struggle as a playwright, that he found success in Hollywood.

In 1975, he adapted Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for his first film credit. The film, directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson as a patient in a psychiatric ward, won best picture at the Oscars and best adapted screenplay for Goldman and Lawrence Hauben.

Five years later, Goldman won again for Jonathan Demme’s Melvin And Howard, based on a luckless Utah gas station owner named Melvin Dummar who claims to be a beneficiary of Howard Hughes after the billionaire’s death.

Those screenplays and more – the family drama Shoot The Moon; The Rose, with Bette Midler; Scent Of A Woman, with Al Pacino – made Goldman a widely considered master of screenwriting along with contemporaries like Billy Wilder and Paddy Chayefsky.

Goldman said he thought of himself as a dramatist who happened to write screenplays. “I’m a screenplaywright,” he said.

“If there is a train of thought that runs through my work, it is a yearning, a longing to make the people real and capture their lives on the screen,” Goldman told The Washington Post in 1982.

“I think there is nothing more fulfilling in the world than to see your view of life realised in art. For me, film is unique – it has a peculiar quality for recreating life. I find life so wonderful, that to try to capture it in art is like trying to catch starlight.”

Goldman also wrote Little Nikita (1988), with Sidney Poitier and River Phoenix and did uncredited work on Garry Marshall’s The Flamingo Kid (1984). He pitched in on Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990) and received a story credit — his final credit — on Beatty’s 2016 film Rules Don’t Apply.

In 2017, the screenwriter Eric Roth for a project by New York magazine about the greatest screenwriters, praised Goldman’s “audacious originality, his understanding of social mores, his ironic sense of humour, and his outright anger at being human, and all with his soft spoken grace and eloquent simplicity”.

Goldman, who lived in Rockport, Maine, lost a son, Jesse, in 1981 and his wife died in 2017. He is survived by four daughters, a son, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Scent Of A Woman (1992), adapted from a 1974 Italian movie of the same name, landed Goldman his third Oscar nomination – and one more moment in the spotlight.

Goldman spoke often about the “absolute toil” of screenwriting.

Even if you are lucky enough to succeed, he said, tension only builds with studios and directors. “You’re fighting for your work all the time,” he said. “And they hold all the cards. And to them it’s shoes. They’re selling shoes.”

Asked by the Times in 1993 how once again finding acclaim with Scent Of A Woman felt, Goldman replied: “People ask me, ‘Are you surprised?’” said Goldman. “I’m always surprised when anything good happens to me.”