ALVIN SARGENT

(12 April 1927 - 9 May 2019)

The American screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who has died of natural causes at the age of 92, was notorious for taking a long time to write his scripts. But, that said, he created many high-profile films and could never be accused of writing second-rate material. He was born Alvin Supowitz in Philadelphia where he was educated but left school to join the US Navy during World War II. Moving to Los Angeles, he worked as a restaurant waiter, then for a clothing company and then as a CBS prop man. After some acting experience, he sold advertisements for the showbiz paper Variety. He began writing for television from 1956 including for Naked City, Ben Casey, Route 66 and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. His first film script was for Gambit (1966) with Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine and then Robert Mulligan’s The Stalking Moon with Gregory Peck, Alan J. Pakula’s The Sterile Cuckoo (aka Pookie) with Liza Minnelli, and I Walk the Line, again with Peck. In the 1970s he wrote The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for director Paul Newman and star Joanne Woodward, Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, and Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, again for Pakula and starring Maggie Smith. He contributed (uncredited) to Streisand’s version of A Star Is Born, Sydney Pollack’s Bobby Deerfield, and Julia for Fred Zinnemann, with whom he had worked as an uncredited actor on From Here to Eternity in 1953. After Straight Time, The Electric Horseman, Nuts (with Streisand), and Ordinary People, Robert Redford’s first film as a director, Sargent worked through the 1990s with Susan Sarandon, Bill Murray, Danny DeVito, Dustin Hoffman, Whoopi Goldberg and Richard Gere, until Spider-Man 2 came along in 2004, followed by Spider-Man 3 and finally The Amazing Spider-Man, his last screenplay (in 2012). Alvin Sargent was married to the actress Joan Camden for over twenty years. After their divorce, he lived with Laura Ziskin, producer of the Spider-Man movies, for 25 years but they married only a year before she died in 2011. Sargent won two Academy Awards, for Julia and Ordinary People.

MICHAEL DARVELL