Robert Benton, the Oscar -winning filmmaker who helped restore the rules in Hollywood as a “Bonnie and Clyde” cooker, and then received conventional validation as the director of writer of “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Place in the Heart”, has died at age 92.
Benton’s son, John Benton, said he died Sunday at his home in Manhattan or “natural causes.”
Duration A career on the 40 -year screen, Texas’s native received six Oscar nominations and won three times: for writing and directing “Kramer vs. Kramer” and for writing “places in the heart.” The actors widely appreciated him as attentive and reliable, and directed Oscar winning actions by Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Sally Field. Although severe dyslexia left him unable to read more than a few pages at the same time when he was a child, Hey wrote and directed cinematographic adaptations of Philip Roth, Doctorow and Richard Russo novels, among others.
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Benton was art director of the magazine Esquire in the early 1960s, when a love for the French New Wave films and the old gangsters stories and the news that a friend won $ 25000 for a script Doris Day inspired him and spoil Abolemare Editer Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, inspired him as prototypes for the rebels of the 60s.
His Tok Tok project to complete as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were among the directors who rejected them before Warren Beatty agreed to produce and star in the film. “Bonnie and Clyde”, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Beaty and Faye Dunaway, exceeded the initial critical resistance in 1967 to the shocking films of violence and became one of the touch stones of the culture of the 1960s and the beginning of a more open and creative in Hollywood.
The original story of Benton and Newman was even more daring: they had made Clyde bisexual Barrow and involved in a 3 -way relationship with Bonnie and their male escape driver. Beatty and Penn resisted, and Barrow was portrayed as impotent, with an unwne not accredited by making numerous other changes in the script. “Honestly, I don’t know who the ‘author’ or ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ was,” Benton told Mark Harris, author of “Pictures at A Revolution,” a book about “Bonnie and Clyde” and four other 1967 films.
Around the following decade, none of Benton’s films approached the impact of “Bonnie and Clyde”, although he continued to have a critical and commercial success. His writing credits included “Superman” and “What’s wrong, Doc?” He directed and co -written the works as well reviewed as “Bad Company”, a Western revisionist with Jeff Bridges and “The Late Show”, a melancholic comedy for which the script received a Oscar nomination.
His career shot in 1979 with his adaptation of Avery Corman’s novel “Kramer Vs. Kramer”, on an advertising executive absorbed in himself who becomes a loving father for his little son after his wife leaves, just to return and request custody. Starring Hoffman and Streep, the film was praised as a perceptual and emotional portrait of changing family changes and expectations and received five academy awards, including the best film. Hoffman, disenchanted at that time with the cinema business, cite “Kramer vs. Kramer” and Benson’s direction to revive his love for the performance of the film.
Five years later, Benton returned to the Oscar’s career with a more personal film, “Places in the heart”, in which he released family stories and childhood memories for his set drama of the 1930s starring fields as mother of two waters in the fights of Houd Is Ho Ho Fights.
“I think that when I saw everything united, I was surprised by the romantic vision of the past,” Benton told Associated Press in 1984, and added that the film was partly a tribute to his mother, who had the launch or “Cramer.”
Benton was born in Waxahachie, Texas, outside or Dallas. Hey owed his love early for films to his father, the employee of the telephone company Eller Douglass Benton, who, instead of asking about the task, would take his family to image programs. The old man Benton would also share memories of attending the funerals of the outlaw Barrow and Parker, Texas, who grew in the Dallas area.
Robert Benton studied at the University of Texas and the University of Columbia, then served in the US Army. He married the artist Sallie Routers in 1964. They had a son.
Among the blows, benton of hard and hard spells. His latest films included disappointments such as the “Billy Bathgate”, “The Human Stain” and “Twilight” Thrillers. He was much more successful with “Nobre’s Fool”, an ironic comedy launched in 1994 and starring Paul Newman, in his last performance nominated for an Oscar, as a village of villages in the state of New York. Benton, whose film was based on Russo’s novel, was nominated for the best adapted script.
“Someone asked me once when the academy awards nominations came out and they called me:” What is the best of the Academy awards? “With whom he is close, some people who have not seen in ten years, some people who have just seen two days before, is your family. ‘It is at home and at home so I have spent my life.”