The Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter also wrote the books behind ‘Hud’, ‘The Last Picture Show’ and ‘Terms of Endearment.’
Larry McMurtry, the Texas-born novelist who wrote Lone Dove, The Last Picture Show and Ties of Tenderness and won an Oscar for co-writing the script adapted for Brokeback mountain, he died. He was 84 years old.
McMurtry died Thursday night of heart failure, said his representative, Amanda Lundberg. The Hollywood Reporter. He died surrounded by loved ones with whom he lived, including his longtime writing partner, Diana Ossana; his wife, Norma Faye; and his three dogs.
Her son, singer-songwriter James McMurtry, grandson Curtis and goddaughter Sara were also at his side.
McMurtry has authored 29 novels, including the Pulitzer Prize winner Lone Dove, three memories, two collections of essays and more than 30 scripts. He wrote five pages a day – no more, no less – on a manual typewriter.
His first published novel, 1961 Knight, pass, set in the country of Texas farmers, became the Paramount drama of 1963 Hudstarring Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas and Patricia Neal. The rights to the film were acquired by Newman and Salem Productions from director Martin Ritt “almost before the last period [was] put in the book, “said the author. (The husband and wife team, Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. adapted their work and shared an Oscar nomination.)
McMurtry received his first Oscar nomination (shared with director Peter Bogdanovich) for adapting his 1966 semi-autobiographical book to The Last Picture Show. The poignant 1971 film about teenagers learning about sex, love and loss in the dusty city of Thalia, Texas, starred Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson (the latter two won supporting actor Oscars).
His 1975 novel Ties of Tenderness, set not amid the Texas hustle and bustle, but in the big city of Houston, was adapted by writer-director-producer James L. Brooks and won five Oscars in 1984 – two for Brooks, including the best film, and one for each Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine.
For Brokeback mountain (2005), McMurtry and longtime collaborator Ossana transformed an 11-page short story by Annie Proulx published in New Yorker in 1997, in the love story of the innovative cowboy who starred Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal and was directed by Oscar winner Ang Lee.
For all his achievements, McMurtry probably identifies himself best with Lone Dove, published in 1985. The subsequent four-part miniseries, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones and featuring a teleplay from William D. Wittliff, received seven Emmy awards and was a blockbuster for CBS in 1989, attracting an average of 26 million viewers one night.
“People are always telling me that I have everything to do with [the miniseries], “McMurtry told Linda Wertheimer of NPR in 2009.” The people who had everything to do with it are the producers, the writers, the designers of the stage, all the people who really worked on it. I was never on the set. I turned the key in the ignition. I didn’t drive the car. “
He followed Lone Dove with the 1993 streak Streets of Laredo (which became a CBS miniseries in 1995, starting with James Garner and Sissy Spacey) and the 1995 and 1997 prequels Dead Man’s Walk (a 1996 ABC miniseries with F. Murray Abraham) and Comanche Moon (a 2008 CBS miniseries starring Steve Zahn).
Asked by Wertheimer why his novels were so successful in Hollywood, McMurtry replied: “I can write characters that the main actors want to play and that’s how the films are made.
“It’s practical. People want to play my characters, important actors that you can get money from, from a bank. You have to finance it, and no one has found a better way to finance it than the star system.”
Larry Jeff McMurtry was born on June 3, 1936, in Wichita Falls, Texas, and was raised on a ranch near Archer City. He graduated from North Texas State College in Denton in 1958 and obtained his master’s degree at Rice University in Houston in 1960.
While he was writing Knight, pass and The Last Picture Show – he took just three weeks to finish, he said – he taught English at Texas Christian University in 1961-62 and Rice at 1963-69.
In his review of the book of The Last Picture Show, The New York Times described McMurty’s Thalia as “dehydrated and physically poor, mean and spiritually mean. [The author] specializes in anatomizing its suffocating and dead-end character. Although the city faces an open prairie, it has no horizons and is as sad as a 24-hour cinema at 10 am. It is a place where a man can live his whole life and end up feeling anonymous. “
McMurtry, however, proved that he could feel at home in the big city, marking the 1970s Moving, 1972 All my friends are going to be strangers and Ties of Tenderness in contemporary Houston, which he once called “more or less my Paris, or the Paris that I had”.
He put 1978 Someone is wanted in Hollywood, 1982’s Cadillac jack in Washington, DC and 1983 The desert rose in Las Vegas.
McMurtry also wrote an original script for another film, Falling from grace (1992), starring John Cougar Mellencamp, who also directed, and Mariel Hemingway. (Mellencamp produced his son’s first studio album, 1989 A long time in Wasteland.)
McMurty met Ossana, who had written and worked as a legal assistant in 1985, and she invited him to recover at his home in Tucson, Arizona, after he had a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in 1991. She helped to edit Streets of Laredo, which he dedicated to her and her daughter, Sara.
McMurtry got up very early to write every day, usually finishing his five pages around 8:30 am. “They become very skeletal,” noted Ossama, “and then I fill them in and then expand them. And we do this every day, seven days a week, during holidays and everything.”
His second project was a script for a gangster movie Pretty Boy Floyd that they sold to Warner Bros. and expanded on a book published in 1994.
The pair took Proulx’s New Yorker history and “materialized along clearly suggested lines,” said McMurtry. “That is, we put it in domestic life. We put the kind of parallel history of women in their lives and show them how complicated this tragedy really was.”
Their most recent collaboration was a roadmap for Good Joe Bell, a 2020 film about a real-life Oregon father (played by Mark Wahlberg) who takes a walk through America with his son.
McMurtry’s novels also included that of 1963 Leaving Cheyenne, filmed as the Sidney Lumet drama Lovin ‘Molly (1974); From 1987 Texasville, which became the 1990 sequel to O Last Image Show; 1990s Buffalo Girls, transformed into a 1995 miniseries starring Anjelica Huston and Melanie Griffith; and 1992 The evening star, a Ties of Tenderness sequence that hit theaters in 1996.
Years later The Last Picture Show was filmed in Archer City, McMurty bought stores in the city to build a rustic book-selling empire. He also owned bookstores in Washington, Houston and Tucson. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2015.
McMurtry married Faye Kesey, the widow of writer Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) in 2011. Survivors also include their brothers Sue, Judy and Charlie. He will be buried in his beloved home state, Texas.
Jackie Strause contributed to this report.