Melissa Mathison

The brief but brilliant career of Melissa Mathison offers a vivid case study of an artist who succeeded in maximizing the benefits of each opportunity she was afforded. Though she had only a half dozen films to her credit when she passed away last year from complications of neuroendocrine cancer at the age of 65, Mathison earned a permanent place in American pop culture as the screenwriter of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" in 1982.

The daughter of a journalist father and part-time publicist mother, Mathison grew up in the Hollywood Hills. She worked as a stringer for TIME magazine and worked for Coppola as an assistant on "The Godfather: Part II" in 1974 and as an executive assistant on Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" in 1979. The celebrated filmmaker urged her to try her hand at screenwriting, which resulted in 1979's "The Black Stallion," based on Walter Farley's classic children's novel about a boy and his horse. The film won kudos for both its sensitive adaptation and supremely cinematic storytelling.

While visiting the set of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in 1981, Mathison was approached by director Steven Spielberg to write a screenplay about an alien who gets stranded on Earth. Eight weeks later she had completed the first draft of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial." This was her first sole screenwriting credit and first original screenplay. The film went on to win four Academy Awards® and gross more than $793 million worldwide, and in 1994 was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

Mathison spent most of the next decade as a homemaker, with a brief excursion to TV to script "Son of the Morning Star" for ABC in 1991, a miniseries biopic about General George Custer starring Gary Cole. In 1995, she returned to feature screenwriting to adapt Lynne Reid Banks' children's novel "The Indian in the Cupboard." Mathison was a natural choice to pen the story of a young boy who discovers that his wooden cabinet has the magical power to bring his toys to life. The project reunited her with "E.T." producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, and once again she revealed a sharp ear for how children speak and a dedication to grounding the fantastic elements of her stories in a realistic context.

Up next was "Kundun" in 1997 for producer-director Martin Scorsese, which was a biopic of his Holiness Tenzing Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lamai of Tibet, who was forced into exile in 1959, nine years after the Chinese invasion. In 2002, Mathison co-authored a biography on boxer Lennox Lewis for Little Brown Publishing and in 2009 she adapted Hayao Miyazaki's script for the English-language version of "Ponyo."

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