William Goldman (born August 12, 1931) has been a novelist, playwright and screenwriter for more than forty years. He has won two Academy Awards (one for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and one for All the President's Men), and three Lifetime Achievement Awards in screenwriting.
Goldman's most famous novel is The Princess Bride, which originated as a bedtime story he wrote for his two daughters and published in 1973. In the novel itself, Goldman pretends to have abridged the work from a manuscript by the fictional author S. Morgenstern from the equally fictional country of Florin, in which The Princess Bride's story takes place. In 1987, his book was made into a feature film by Rob Reiner that, despite having only modest success at the box office, has acquired a considerable following since its release on home video and is now widely considered to be a classic family film. It is #50 on the Bravo TV channel's "100 Funniest Movies" list, Total Film magazine's 38th-greatest comedy film of all time, and #88 on The American Film Institute's "100 Years...100 Passions" list of best cinematic love stories.
Although The Princess Bride's popularity has prompted Goldman to consider writing a sequel entitled Buttercup's Baby (and has actually written an opening chapter for it that is included in some of the latest editions of The Princess Bride), he has admitted in a 2007 interview to having difficulty composing a suitable plot for the book, shedding some doubt on his original intention to complete the endeavor prior to The Princess Bride's 35th anniversary in 2009.
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