Robert Benton, the much-admired screenwriter turned director who co-wrote Bonnie and Clyde and received a pair of Academy Awards for his work on the best picture winner Kramer vs. Kramer, has died. He was 92.
Benton died Sunday at his home in Manhattan, his longtime assistant and manager, Marisa Forzano, told The New York Times.
Benton captured a third Oscar for his screenplay for Places in the Heart (1984), an autobiographical saga based on his grandmother’s hard experiences during the Depression in Texas. He received yet another Oscar nomination for his direction of that drama, and he was nominated for his screenplays for Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — one of the fruits of his partnership with David Newman — The Late Show (1977) and Nobody’s Fool (1994). He helmed the last two as well.
Benton and Newman also wrote films including There Was a Crooked Man … (1970), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and the Peter Bogdanovich screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc? (1972), and the duo shared screenwriting credit on Superman (1978) with Mario Puzo and Leslie Newman.
More recently, Benton directed the highly regarded The Human Stain (2003), starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman in the Philip Roth adaptation, and Feast of Love (2007), with Morgan Freeman and Radha Mitchell.
A landmark drama about the emotional tug of divorce, Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) also won Oscars for lead actors Dustin Hoffman (who was going through a divorce in real life during production) and, in a star-making turn, Meryl Streep. Their son in the movie, Justin Henry, then 7, also earned an Oscar nom.
Benton “spends a great deal of attention on the nuances of dialogue,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review. “His characters aren’t just talking to each other, they’re revealing things about themselves and can sometimes be seen in the act of learning about their own motives. That’s what makes Kramer vs. Kramer such a touching film: We get the feeling at times that personalities are changing and decisions are being made even as we watch them.”
Benton also called the shots for Hoffman in Billy Bathgate (1991), an adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow novel.
Benton directed Paul Newman to an Oscar nomination in Nobody’s Fool and guided the actor again in Twilight (1998). He co-wrote both films with Richard Russo; they worked together on four films in all.
Benton was considered an “actor’s director,” one who consistently attracted top talent to his productions. “Before I directed for the first time, I remember walking down the street and thinking, ‘How can I direct people to just speak normally?’” he said in a 2013 interview with THR‘s Scott Feinberg. “And later I learned, you just hire good actors.”
His actors earned eight Oscar noms, and three won, including Sally Field, who was honored for her performance in Places of the Heart. The pensive, modest filmmaker said that there was one common thread that flowed through all his work — family.
Robert Benton was born on Sept. 29, 1932, in Dallas and raised in the nearby town of Waxahachie. His father had two brothers, both of whom were murdered. As a child, he was dyslexic and struggled in school.
“Nobody knew about dyslexia in those days,” he told Feinberg. “If I read for about 10 minutes, I would get wired and couldn’t read any more. But I could draw, and that uses the other side of the brain. So I drew and I drew and I drew. I took my identity off of that.
“The other thing that happened was my father would come home from work and instead of saying, ‘Have you done your homework?’ … he would say, ‘Do you want to go to the movies?’ I learned narrative from movies, not books.”
Benton attended the University of Texas at Austin, where his classmates included Rip Torn — whom he would direct in the 1950s Austin-set Nadine (1987) — and Jayne Mansfield. He received a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1953 despite flunking out of the only creative writing class he took.
After serving in the U.S. Army from 1954-56, Benton spent a semester at Columbia University before joining Esquire as an assistant to the art director. It was at the magazine that he met David Newman, then an editor. He spent about five years there before he was fired.
In 1959, he and Newman published Extremism: A Non-Book, a satirical look at right- and left-wing extremism in U.S. politics, and then wrote the book for the 1966 Broadway musical It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman.
The twosome had spent a decade writing spec scripts before they hit pay dirt with Bonnie and Clyde.
“By chance we were reading a [1963] book by John Toland on John Dillinger, in which there’s a footnote about them saying. ‘They were not only outlaws, they were outcasts.’ That appealed to us,” Benton said. “I remembered all these stories about Bonnie and Clyde from growing up.” Indeed, his dad had attended the gangsters’ funerals on the same weekend in Dallas in 1934.
“So we decided to write a sort of French New Wave movie set in America about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. We did a lot of research and found stories in detective magazines, and a lot of stuff we made up.”
François Truffaut helped them rework their treatment and, too busy to direct, gave it to Jean-Luc Godard, who decided not to make it. Things languished for almost five years before Warren Beatty bought the script for $10,000, coming aboard to produce and star as Clyde opposite Faye Dunaway as Bonnie. He also picked Arthur Penn to direct.
With encouragement from Paramount Pictures president Stanley Jaffe, Benton made his directorial debut with Bad Company (1972), an offbeat Civil War-set adaptation of Oliver Twist that starred Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown.
He then wrote and helmed the film noir classic The Late Show, starring Art Carney as an elderly gumshoe and Lily Tomlin as the pot-smoking woman who hires him.
Benton also directed and co-wrote with Newman the literate thriller Still of the Night (1982), starring Roy Scheider, Streep and Jessica Tandy.
Survivors include his son, John. His wife of 60 years, Sallie, a fashion illustrator turned painter, died in 2023 at age 88.
