William Goldman, the award-winning screenwriter behind The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and All the President's Men, has died at 87, Deadline and The Washington Post reported Friday.
Goldman died Thursday night at his home in Manhattan, Deadline reports, noting that he had been in ill health and his condition had deteriorated over the summer. No cause of death has been released.
Goldman began his career as a novelist, but he soon transitioned into Hollywood and became best known for his movies — screenwriter C. Robert Cargill on Friday described him as the "patron saint of screenwriting." His first screenplay was the 1969 classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for which he took home an Academy Award. He would go on to win a second Academy Award for writing All the President's Men in 1976, and he also wrote the screenplay for The Princess Bride, which was based on his novel of the same name. Over the course of his career, Goldman produced dozens of screenplays and consistently worked as a script doctor; some of his other movies included The Stepford Wives, Marathon Man, Heat, Misery, and Chaplin.
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After winning his second Oscar, Goldman shared his knowledge of the industry in the book Adventures in the Screen Trade, in which he famously declared that in Hollywood, "nobody knows anything."
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