William Goldman, screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men, has died aged 87.
Goldman, who received Oscars for both of those films, also wrote Marathon Man, Magic and The Princess Bride, which he adapted from his own novels, reports BBC.
His memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade is famous for his memorable declaration that "nobody knows anything" about the movie business.
He was also a noted "script doctor" who worked uncredited on many features.
Born in Highland Park, Illinois in 1931, Goldman started out as a novelist before breaking into movies with 1965 spy caper Masquerade.
He followed that with The Moving Target, also known as Harper, in which Paul Newman played a laconic private eye.
Newman would go on to star in Butch Cassidy with Robert Redford, who himself went on to star with Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men.
Goldman was much praised for his dramatisation of the Washington Post's investigations into the Watergate affair.
Disagreements during its production, however, would later see him express a wish he had never taken on the project.
"If you were to ask me 'What would you change if you had your movie life to live over?' I'd tell you that I'd have written exactly the screenplays I've written," he wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade.
"Only I wouldn't have come near All the President's Men."
