BO GOLDMAN

(10 September 1932 - 25 July 2023)

The American screenwriter and playwright Bo Goldman, who has died aged 90, was an Academy Award winner for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Melvin and Howard. His Scent of a Woman was also Oscar and Bafta nominated and won a Golden Globe. He had both the luck and the talent to work on some very high-profile movies, such as The Rose, Shoot the Moon, City Hall. Meet Joe Black and Rules Don’t Apply.

Robert Spencer Goldman was born to a Jewish family in New York City. His father Julian was a Broadway producer and chain store owner, and his mother a hat model. Julian backed the Dalton School where Bo was educated, before enrolling at the Phillips Exeter Academy, where he began writing, composing and producing his 1953 show Ham in Legs which made it onto TV’s The Ed Sullivan Show.

He enrolled at Princeton University before three years in the U.S. Army. After Army service, he wrote lyrics for Jule Styne’s score to First Impressions, the 1959 musical based on Pride and Prejudice. Live television work followed as he was script editor for the Playhouse 90 series, working with the likes of John Frankenheimer and Eli Wallach. Burt Lancaster suggested he try writing for films, and Milos Forman commissioned him to adapt Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The film (1975) went on to critical acclaim and won five Oscars, for best picture, best director (Forman), best actor (Jack Nicholson), best actress (Louise Fletcher) and best screenplay (Goldman), and was the second film in history to win all five major accolades (the first was Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, in 1934). Goldman’s next film was The Rose, co-written with Bill Kerby in 1979, for Bette Midler. It gained four Academy Award nominations.

Melvin and Howard (1980) was an original screenplay about a garage owner, Melvin Dummar, who, after meeting Howard Hughes, was left $156m in the millionaire’s hand-written will. It starred Jason Robards and Paul Le Mat and won an Oscar for Goldman and best supporting actress Mary Steenburgen. Shoot the Moon had been written in 1971 by Goldman but Alan Parker decided to film it eleven years later with Albert Finney and Diane Keaton as a couple in a marriage that is breaking up. It was well received but did not win any of its many award nominations. Milos Forman’s Ragtime, for which Goldman made some script revisions, co-starred James Cagney and Pat O’Brien, both in their last film, but it too won none of the major awards. Goldman also made revisions on Jonathan Demme’s Swing Shift, Garry Marshall’s The Flamingo Kid, Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy and Wolfgang Petersen’s The Perfect Storm.

Goldman was involved in co-writing Little Nikita, a thriller with Sidney Poitier and River Phoenix in 1988, City Hall with Paul Schrader for Al Pacino, John Cusack and Bridget Fonda, and Martin Brest’s Meet Joe Black with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins. In 1992 he wrote the screenplay for Scent of a Woman. Al Pacino played a blind, retired army lieutenant colonel for which he received an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, the latter alongside those for best drama and Goldman’s screenplay. He also collaborated on another Howard Hughes project, Rules Don’t Apply (2016), with co-writer, producer, director and star Warren Beatty as you know who. It was Bo Goldman’s last screenplay.

Bo Goldman was married to Mabel Ashforth from 1954 until her death in 2017. They have a daughter, Serena, and a son, Justin.

MICHAEL DARVELL