‘ET’ Screenwriter Melissa Mathison Dies at 65

She was just 65 years old. Mathison laid the foundation for one of the greatest movies ever made and directly contributed to films from master directors. She was his second wife, and though the on-again, off-again couple first separated in the late 1990s and legally separated in 2001, they didn’t finalize their divorce until three years alter, long after Ford began dating Calista Flockhart.

According her family, Mathison had been battling neuroendocrine cancer.

Mathison’s first major Hollywood film project was 1979’s adaptation of the Walter Farley novel “The Black Stallion”.

But she will always be especially connected to “E.T”, and her writing had a strong impact on the movie, Spielberg said on the film’s special edition DVD.

Melissa recently reunited with Steven, to work on his new adaptation of the Roald Dahl book The BFG. Her other credits include The Escape Artist (1982), a segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), The Indian In The Cupboard (1995) and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997).

Melissa Mathison wrote iconic family films in which children were often the heroes, her most famous and critically acclaimed being E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Mathison’s most recognized for her work on E.T. Released in 1982, it became the biggest box office hit of its time, and netted Mathison an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. “Both my parents had wonderful, eccentric, artistic friends who treated us as friends as well”.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Melissa Mathison never wrote down to her audiences. Here she is in 1996 with her then husband Harrison Ford.

Credit: Vassi Koutsaftis/Getty Harrison Ford and Melissa Mathison pose with the Dalai Lama in 1996.