Benedict Fitzgerald, Co-writer of ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ Dies at 74

Benedict Fitzgerald, the co-writer of Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ, has died. He was 74.

Fitzgerald died Jan. 17 after a long illness at his home in Marsala, Sicily, his cousin Nancy Morgan Ritter told The Hollywood Reporter.

Best known for his work on Gibson’s 2004 Biblical epic, the highest-grossing Christian film, as well as the highest-grossing independent film of all time, Fitzgerald’s other credits include co-writing the screenplay for John Huston’s Wise Blood (1979), the adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel.

Born on March 9, 1949, in New York, Fitzgerald was born into a literary household. His deeply Catholic mother, Sally, was a writer and editor and his father, Robert, was a poet, United States Poet Laureate (1984-1985), critic, and famed translator of classic ancient Greek and Latin texts, who was responsible for perhaps the most well-known translation of Homer’s The Odyssey.

In the late 1950s, Fitzgerald’s family moved to Italy whilst his father was translating The Odyssey, although he was sent to boarding school in Rhode Island. He attended Harvard University in the early 1970s, where his interest in cinema and writing, and penning screenplays in particular, was piqued.

His family’s connection to the writer Flannery O’Connor would help Fitzgerald’s move into screenwriting. His mother was a close friend and literary collaborator of O’Connor, and would later publish The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor after the writer’s death. In 1949, O’Connor lived with the Fitzgeralds at their home in Connecticut, staying for two years, and often babysat the young Fitzgerald children.

O’Connor’s celebrated work Wise Blood would become Fitzgerald’s first screenplay to be produced. Co-written with his brother Michael, the siblings mailed the screenplay unsolicited to a semi-retired John Huston then living in Mexico. With Huston on board, Michael gathered together the financing to make the picture, and in turn, the production would launch Fitzgerald’s brother’s career as a film producer, whose credits include Huston’s Under the Volcano (1984), Sean Penn’s The Pledge (2001) and Brian W. Cook’s Color Me Kubrick (2005).

Wise Blood starred Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton and Dan Shor and premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979. Though it had a respectable impact at the box office, Wise Blood was a hit with critics, and an enduring one at that, and made The New York Times‘ “Best 1000 Movies Ever” list in 2003.

Following the warm reception to Wise Blood, Fitzgerald focused on literary adaptations. His next produced screenplay took over a decade to make it to the screen, a 1993 television movie adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that starred Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz. That same year, Fitzgerald was the writer of Zelda, a television movie starring Natasha Richardson and Timothy Hutton, that told the story of the relationship between author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda.

In 1996, the Fitzgerald-penned miniseries In Cold Blood aired on CBS. An adaptation of Truman Capote’s true crime classic, the series starred Anthony Edwards as Dick Hickock, Eric Roberts as Perry Smith, Sam Neill as Alvin Dewey, and was nominated for two Emmy Awards. Two years later, Fitzgerald was an uncredited writer on the USA Network’s big-budget miniseries adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Starring Patrick Stewart as Captain Ahab, the series would go on to score five Emmy nominations.

In 1999, after discussing a failed miniseries adaptation of The Iliad with Mel Gibon’s Icon Productions, Gibson approached Fitzgerald about writing the script for The Passion of the Christ, a film about the Passion of Jesus shortly before his death. Fitzgerald spent a year and a half researching the script and worked closely with William Fulco, who was responsible for the translations to Latin and the reconstructed Aramaic used in the film. Released independently through Icon in February 2004, The Passion of the Christ would become a global box office phenomenon, grossing over $600 million from a $30 million budget.

Fitzgerald would later, in 2008, sue Gibson over his cut of the profits from The Passion of the Christ, with the writer reportedly receiving only $100,000 for his script and a $75,000 production bonus. In 2009, Fitzgerald and Gibson settled. Fitzgerald attempted to followup and capitalize on the success of The Passion of the Christ by writing a prequel that focused on Mary. Titled Myriam, Mother of the Christ, the film went unproduced, as it became mired in legal cases and acrimony, with Fitzgerald eventually losing the rights.

He is survived by his wife Karen, daughters Eugenie, Helena and Olimpia and three grandchildren, as well as siblings Ughetta, Maria, Michael, Barnaby and Caterina.