Robert Benton, Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Kramer Vs Kramer, dies at 92
During a 40-year screen career, the Texas native received six Oscar nominations and won three times.
Robert Benton, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who helped reset the rules in Hollywood as the co-creator of Bonnie And Clyde, and later received mainstream validation as the writer-director of Kramer Vs Kramer, has died at the age age 92.
His son John said he died Sunday at his home in Manhattan of “natural causes”.
During a 40-year screen career, the Texas native received six Oscar nominations and won three times: for writing and directing Kramer Vs Kramer and for writing Places In The Heart.
He was widely appreciated by actors as attentive and trusting, and directed Oscar-winning performances by Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Sally Field.
Although severe dyslexia left him unable to read more than a few pages at a time as a child, he wrote and directed film adaptations of novels by Philip Roth, EL Doctorow and Richard Russo, among others.
Benton was an art director for Esquire magazine in the early 1960s when a love for French New Wave movies and old gangster stories inspired him and Esquire editor David Newman to draft a treatment about the lives of Depression-era robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, imagining them as prototypes for 1960s rebels.
The project took years to complete as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were among the directors who turned them down before Warren Beatty agreed to produce and star in the movie.
Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Beatty and Faye Dunaway, overcame initial critical resistance in 1967 to the film’s shocking violence and became one of the touchstones of 1960s culture and the start of a more open and creative era in Hollywood.
The original story by Benton and Newman was even more daring: they had made Clyde Barrow bisexual and involved in a three-way relationship with Bonnie and their male getaway driver.
Beatty and Penn resisted and Barrow was instead portrayed as impotent, with an uncredited Robert Towne making numerous other changes to the script.
“I honestly don’t know who the ‘auteur’ of Bonnie And Clyde was,” Benton later told Mark Harris, author of Pictures At A Revolution, a book about Bonnie And Clyde and four other movies from 1967.
Over the following decade, none of Benton’s films approached the impact of Bonnie And Clyde, although he continued to have critical and commercial success.
His writing credits included Superman and What’s Up, Doc? He directed and co-wrote such well-reviewed works as Bad Company, a revisionist western featuring Jeff Bridges, and The Late Show, a melancholy comedy for which his screenplay received an Oscar nomination.
His career soared in 1979 with his adaptation of the Avery Corman novel Kramer Vs Kramer, about a self-absorbed advertising executive who becomes a loving parent to his young son after his wife walks out, only to have her return and ask for custody.
Starring Hoffman and Streep, the movie was praised as a perceptive, emotional portrait of changing family roles and expectations and won five Academy Awards, including best picture.
Hoffman, disenchanted at the time with the film business, cited the movie and Benson’s direction for reviving his love for movie acting.
Five years later, Benton was back in the Oscars race with a more personal film, Places In The Heart, in which he drew on family stories and childhood memories for his 1930s-set drama starring Field as a mother of two in Texas who fights to hold on to her land after her husband is killed.
“I think that when I saw it all strung together, I was surprised at what a romantic view I had of the past,” Benton told the Associated Press in 1984, adding that the movie was in part a tribute to his mother, who had died shortly before the release of Kramer Vs Kramer.
Benton was born in Waxahachie, Texas, outside Dallas. He owed his early love for movies to his father, telephone company employee Ellery Douglass Benton who, instead of asking about homework, would take his family to the picture shows.
The elder Benton would also share memories of attending the funerals of outlaws Barrow and Parker, Texas natives who grew up in the Dallas area.
Robert Benton studied at the University of Texas and Columbia University, then served in the US Army from 1954 until 1956.
While at Esquire, he helped start the magazine’s long-standing Dubious Achievement Award and dated Gloria Steinem, then on staff at the humour magazine Help! He married artist Sallie Rendigs in 1964. They had one son.
Between hits, Benton often endured long dry spells. His latter films included such disappointments as the thrillers Billy Bathgate, The Human Stain and Twilight.
He had much more success with Nobody’s Fool, a wry comedy released in 1994 and starring Paul Newman, in his last Oscar-nominated performance, as a small-town troublemaker in upstate New York.
Benton, whose film was based on Russo’s novel, was nominated for best adapted screenplay.
