Celebrity Biographies
Melissa Mathison
Melissa Mathison passed away yesterday, Wednesday November 4, 2015 as a result of cancer, as reported by her brother, Dick Mathison, at the age of 65. He wrote titles such as “The Black Steed”, “The Magic Key”, “Kundun”, and above all “ET, the Extra-Terrestrial”, for which he received an Oscar nomination. “Melissa had a heart that shone with generosity and love and that it shone as brightly as the heart he gave to ET,” Steven Spielberg said.
Born on June 3, 1950 in Los Angeles, Melissa Marie Mathison was the daughter of a journalist. After graduating from the University of California, she wrote the screenplay for The Black Steed , about a boy fascinated by a beautiful horse. She was producing Francis Ford Coppola , as was Master in Fugues, where she also had a hand in the script.
But his biggest success was ET, the Extra-Terrestrial , a memorable screenplay with evangelical parallels about the friendship of a boy and an alien whose companions have abandoned him on Earth, for which he stole the John Briley Academy statuette for Gandhi . It was one of the milestones for Steven Spielberg , with whom he also collaborated on In the limits of reality .
Married to actor Harrison Ford in 1983, the couple had two children, Malcolm and Georgia, although the divorce came in 2004.
After a crucial meeting with the Dalai Lama when writing Kundun , for Martin Scorsese , Melissa Mathison put her Hollywood career on hold to focus on her work as an activist for the cause of Tibet, as she was part of the board of directors of the International Campaign for Tibet. Her last work for her screen has been My Friend the Giant , the adaptation of “The Big Good-natured Giant”, the children’s story by Roald Dahl directed by her friend Spielberg.