Beloved "E.T The Extra-Terrestrial" screenwriter and Harrison Ford's ex-wife, Melissa Mathison, passed away on Nov. 4. Her cause of death stemmed from complications borne from neuroendocrine cancer, a rare type of tumor that can cause severe symptoms and may require aggressive therapy. She was 65 years old.
Melissa Mathison is best known for her work as the screenwriter for Steven Spielberg's 1982 classic "E.T The Extra-Terrestrial" where, Spielberg admits, Mathison came up with the phrase "E.T. phone home."
"I immediately thought she'd be right to write this story I'd been kicking around for years. So between shots we'd take long walks and I'd try to convince her to write 'E.T.', and she tried to convince me she wasn't the right writer for it," Spielberg recalled. Once Spielberg and Ford got Mathison to agree, she wrote the script in eight weeks and the rest was history. "We were striving to achieve ideas about responsibility, about unconditional love, about the unimportance of appearance and communicating on a deeper level," Mathison once said about E.T.
It was her first and only Oscar nomination but that didn't stop the talented writer from continuing to work in other amazing films, including "The Indian in the Cupboard" and the Academy Award winning film directed by Martin Scorsese, "Kundun."
Prior to her death, Mathison was once again working with Spielberg on bringing Roald Dahl's "The BFG," short for "Big Friendly Giant." "She began working on it five years ago, and we had been working together intensely for the last 24 months... and she stayed with every project until the very end," Spielber said about Mathison's participation in "The BFG."
"The BFG" is currently in post-production and is expected to be released in July 2016.
Mathison is survived by her two children with Harrison Ford, son Malcom Ford, from the band The Dough Rollers, and daughter Georgia Ford, an actress.
Be sure to follow T-Lounge on Twitter and visit our Facebook page.
