Melissa Mathison, the screenwriter who has crafted E.T. and the Extra Terrestrial, has died.
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Melissa is most famous for her Oscar-nominated script for the Steven Spielberg classic E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, with the line “E.T. phone home” ranking among the American Film Institute’s top 100 quotes of American cinema. Other credits includeThe Black Stallion and Kundun, the 1997 biography of the Dali Lama.
She recently reunited with Spielberg to provide the script for his next film, Roald Dahl adaptation The BFG, which will be seen in cinemas on July 22 next year.
Mathison was famously married to Hollywood actor Harrison Ford for two decades, from 1983 until their divorce in 2004. Her brother Dirk confirmed that she passed from a long illness. She and Ford had two children, Georgia and Malcolm.
Harrison Ford and Melissa Mathison, year unknown.
Mathison, 65, who portrayed children as sensitively heroic, died Wednesday at UCLA Medical Center. An active support of Tibet freedom, she was also on the board of the nonprofit advocacy group worldwide Campaign for Tibet. I think of her as being a great parent.
Melissa Mathison never wrote down to her audiences. The movie, due to be released in 2016, is now in post-production.
Mathison spent eight weeks writing “E.T”. Mathison. You wrote a few fantastic, handsome movies.
She received an Oscar nomination for her work on Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.”, which was released in 1982.
An aspiring writer, she eventually became the director’s assistant and met the actor Harrison Ford while working on the set of Coppola’s Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now, in the 1970s.
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A lover of children’s literature, she adapted the novel “The Indian in the Cupboard”.
