Celebrity Biographies
Michael Blake
Only two of the screenplays he wrote were made into movies, but one, the adaptation of his novel “Dances with Wolves,” won him an Oscar. Michael Blake has passed away at 69 due to heart failure.
Michael Blake was born as Michael Lennox Webb in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and there he learned about the military environment, since his father belonged to the army. The surname Blake with which he would sign his writings was taken from his mother. He himself worked in the air force, although he liked to write, and he did it in the newspaper of the base where he was stationed. He also studied at the University of New Mexico, although he later enrolled in Berkeley at the University of California Film School. There he hit it off with Jim Wilson , and with a then-unknown Kevin Costner in the lead he penned the script for Stacy’s Knights .(1983), a tape that passed without pain or glory. Blake was not discouraged, and he kept writing scripts that never made it to production.
Blake’s luck changed when he read the book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown, which described the hardships suffered by Native Americans at the hands of the white man. He then had the idea of telling the story of a soldier who undergoes a transformation after his contact with the Sioux. When he shared it with his friend Costner, he couldn’t get better advice: he should write a novel, and then maybe they’d take him seriously in the face of a possible movie. Said and done, he got to it, even at the cost of precarious jobs and more than fair money. The fact is that he published the book Bailando con lobosin 1988 and shortly after it would be Kevin Costner himself who would tell him that he wanted to direct, produce and star in the film adaptation. The novel sold very well, the film marked the revival of what seemed to be a dead genre, the western, and the public success was accompanied by awards, 7 Oscars, including the one for best film, as well as the one for best adapted screenplay for Blake.
Seen the good result, Blake continued his career as a novelist, and published “Airman Mortensen” in 1991 and even a sequel to the adventures of Lieutenant Dunbar in “Dances with Wolves”, “The Holy Road”, which would not have the same reception.
Delicate in health – he had had lymphoma and had undergone a double bypass – his heart did not resist, and he died on May 2 at the age of 69. He is survived by his wife and three of his children, whose given names draw on American Indian roots.