Robert Benton, Oscar-winning filmmaker of 'Kramer vs. Kramer,' dead at
92
[May 14, 2025]
By HILLEL ITALIE
NEW YORK (AP) — Robert Benton, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who helped
reset the rules in Hollywood as the co-creator of "Bonnie and Clyde,"
and later received mainstream validation as the writer-director of
"Kramer vs. Kramer" and "Places in the Heart," has died at age 92.
Benton's son, John Benton, said that he died Sunday at his home in
Manhattan of “natural causes.”
During a 40-year screen career, the Texas native received six Oscar
nominations and won three times: for writing and directing "Kramer vs.
Kramer" and for writing "Places in the Heart." He was widely appreciated
by actors as attentive and trusting, and directed Oscar-winning
performances by Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Sally Field. Although
severe dyslexia left him unable to read more than a few pages at a time
as a child, he wrote and directed film adaptations of novels by Philip
Roth, E.L. Doctorow and Richard Russo, among others.
Benton was an art director for Esquire magazine in the early 1960s when
a love for French New Wave movies and old gangster stories (and news
that a friend got $25,000 for a Doris Day screenplay) inspired him and
Esquire editor David Newman to draft a treatment about the lives of
Depression-era robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, imagining them as
prototypes for 1960s rebels.
Their project took years to complete as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc
Godard were among the directors who turned them down before Warren
Beatty agreed to produce and star in the movie. "Bonnie and Clyde,"
directed by Arthur Penn and starring Beatty and Faye Dunaway, overcame
initial critical resistance in 1967 to the film's shocking violence and
became one of the touchstones of 1960s culture and the start of a more
open and creative era in Hollywood.
The original story by Benton and Newman was even more daring: they had
made Clyde Barrow bisexual and involved in a 3-way relationship with
Bonnie and their male getaway driver. Beatty and Penn both resisted, and
Barrow instead was portrayed as impotent, with an uncredited Robert
Towne making numerous other changes to the script. “I honestly don’t
know who the ‘auteur’ of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ was,” Benton later told Mark
Harris, author of “Pictures at a Revolution," a book about “Bonnie and
Clyde” and four other movies from 1967.
Oscar-winning triumphs
Over the following decade, none of Benton’s films approached the impact
of "Bonnie and Clyde,” although he continued to have critical and
commercial success. His writing credits included "Superman" and "What's
Up, Doc?" He directed and co-wrote such well-reviewed works as "Bad
Company," a revisionist Western featuring Jeff Bridges, and "The Late
Show," a melancholy comedy for which his screenplay received an Oscar
nomination.
His career soared in 1979 with his adaptation of the Avery Corman novel
"Kramer vs. Kramer," about a self-absorbed advertising executive who
becomes a loving parent to his young son after his wife walks out, only
to have her return and ask for custody. Starring Hoffman and Streep, the
movie was praised as a perceptive, emotional portrait of changing family
roles and expectations and received five Academy Awards, including best
picture. Hoffman, disenchanted at the time with the film business, would
cite “Kramer vs. Kramer” and Benson's direction for reviving his love
for movie acting.
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Director Robert Benton arrives for the screening of "Feast of Love"
in New York on Sept. 17, 2007. (AP Photo/Rick Maiman, File)
 Five years later, Benton was back in
the Oscars race with a more personal film, "Places in the Heart," in
which he drew upon family stories and childhood memories for his
1930s-set drama starring Fields as a mother of two in Texas who
fights to hold on to her land after her husband is killed.
“I think that when I saw it all strung together, I was surprised at
what a romantic view I had of the past,” Benton told The Associated
Press in 1984, adding that the movie was in part a tribute to his
mother, who had died shortly before the release of “Kramer vs.
Kramer.”
A lifelong movie fan
Benton was born in Waxahachie, Texas, outside of Dallas. He owed his
early love for movies to his father, telephone company employee
Ellery Douglass Benton, who, instead of asking about homework, would
take his family to the picture shows. The elder Benton would also
share memories of attending the funerals of outlaws Barrow and
Parker, Texas natives who grew up in the Dallas area.
Robert Benton studied at the University of Texas and Columbia
University, then served in the U.S. Army from 1954 until 1956. While
at Esquire, Benton helped start the magazine’s long-standing Dubious
Achievement Award and dated Gloria Steinem, then on staff at the
humor magazine Help! He married artist Sallie Rendigs in 1964. They
had one son.
Between hits, Benton often endured long dry spells. His latter films
included such disappointments as the thrillers "Billy Bathgate,"
"The Human Stain" and "Twilight." He had much more success with
"Nobody's Fool," a wry comedy released in 1994 and starring Paul
Newman, in his last Oscar-nominated performance, as a small-town
troublemaker in upstate New York. Benton, whose film was based on
Russo's novel, was nominated for best adapted screenplay.
“Somebody asked me once when the Academy Award nominations came out
and I'd been nominated, ‘What's the great thing about the Academy
Awards?’” Benton told Venice magazine in 1998. “I said ‘When you go
to the awards and you see people, some of whom you've had bitter
fights with, some of whom you're close friends with, some people you
haven't seen in ten years, some people you just saw two days before
— it's your family.’ It's home. And home is what I've spent my life
looking for.”
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