Robert Benton, Oscar-winning filmmaker of 'Kramer vs. Kramer,' dead at 92
Source: Associated Press
Robert Benton, Oscar-winning filmmaker of ‘Kramer vs. Kramer,’ dead at 92
By Hillel Italie
Updated 4:32 PM EDT, May 13, 2025
NEW YORK (AP) — Robert Benton, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who helped reset the rules in Hollywood as the co-creator of “Bonnie and Clyde,” and later received mainstream validation as the writer-director of “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Places in the Heart,” has died at age 92.
Benton’s son, John Benton, said that he died Sunday at his home in Manhattan of “natural causes.”
During a 40-year screen career, the Texas native received six Oscar nominations and won three times: for writing and directing “Kramer vs. Kramer” and for writing “Places in the Heart.” He was widely appreciated by actors as attentive and trusting, and directed Oscar-winning performances by Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Sally Field. Although severe dyslexia left him unable to read more than a few pages at a time as a child, he wrote and directed film adaptations of novels by Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow and Richard Russo, among others.
Benton was an art director for Esquire magazine in the early 1960s when a love for French New Wave movies and old gangster stories (and news that a friend got $25,000 for a Doris Day screenplay) inspired him and Esquire editor David Newman to draft a treatment about the lives of Depression-era robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, imagining them as prototypes for 1960s rebels.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/article/robert-benton-died-92-oscar-kramer-f88101198a604fac82234dba7b27ed1c