Frank Pierson — who won the Oscar for his original screenplay, Dog Day Afternoon — has died of natural causes after a short illness. He was 87.
Pierson had previously received Oscar nominations for Cat Ballou and Cool Hand Luke and his other writing credits include the Harrison Ford thriller Presumed Innocent.
More recently, he’d been writing and producing on the TV shows The Good Wife and Man Men.
In addition to his writing, Pierson also took an active role in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the body that hands out the Oscars. He headed the Writers’ Branch of the Academy for seventeen years and served as it’s president between 2001 and 2005.
The current governor of the Writers’ Branch, Phil Robinson, said Frank PiersonĀ had always shown — better than anyone else — how to write “with class, grace, humour, strength, brilliance, generosity and a joyful tenacity.”