It was discovered that Mathison had worked as a babysitter when she was 12 for director Francis Ford Coppola’s family, which helped her secure a job on these two iconic films.
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Screenwriter Melissa Mathison and director Steven Spielberg at the 20th-anniversary premiere of “E.T.” in 2002. During filming in 1997, she became friends with the Dalai Lama and remained an activist for Tibet till the end of her life. She also worked on the English language translation of Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo.
Her last screenplay was also a children’s film, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, which stands for Big Friendly Giant.Spielberg once again directed.
“Harrison Ford’s Ex-Wife of 17 Years Dies at 65” is categorized as “entertainment”.
Spielberg credited much of ET’s huge success to Mathison, saying on the DVD special edition: “It was a script I was willing to shoot the next day”.
“We weren’t your mainstream ’50s family”, she told the newspaper.
Ford went on to tie the knot with actress Calista Flockhart in 2010 after he met her at the 2002 Golden Globe Awards, while Mathison never remarried. After that came The Escape Artist in 1982, the same year Mathison’s most famous movie, E.T. was released. They filed for a divorce in 2001.
But it was the 1979 script for The Black Stallion, an American classic novel about a child shipwrecked on a deserted island with a wild Arab stallion who he befriends, that brought her A-list accreditation.
Mathison was born in Los Angeles and attended U.C. Berkeley. More on her background includes personally knowing the Dalai Lama. She is pictured with her then-husband Harrison Ford.
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Her sister, Melinda Johnson, confirmed the news to The Associated Press.
