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

Benedict Fitzgerald, the co-writer of Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ, has passed away at the age of 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).

The film 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,
Read More