Horton Foote, who died yesterday at 92, was a prolific playwright who became Hollywood's go-to guy for rustic rural drama. Foote, who had had his work produced on Broadway since 1940, began writing scripts for TV with 1953's The Trip to Bountiful, which starred Lillian Gish, and broke into movies with the 1955 Storm Fear, directed by Cornel Wilde and based on a novel by Clinton Seeley. His real big break in movies came with his second job, also an adaptation: he won an Academy Award for turning Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird into a screenplay for the 1962 movie directed by Robert Mulligan. Foote and Mulligan would work together again on the 1965 Baby, the Rain Must Fall, which marked the first time Foote would get to adapt his own work for the movies. (It was based on his play The Traveling Saleslady.) Perhaps more importantly, Mockingbird began Foote's movie partnership with Robert Duvall; he would personally recommend the actor, who Foote knew from the New York theater scene, for the role of Boo Radley. It was Duvall's movie debut. Ten years later, Duvall would take the lead role in Tomorrow, a small movie written by Foote, based on a story by William Faulkner; seventeen years later, Duvall would tell an interviewer that it was his "favorite role, ever." The two would work together again on 1983's Tender Mercies, directed by Bruce Beresford from Foote's original screenplay. It won Foote his second Oscar, as well a Best Actor Academy Award for Duvall.

Foote's other movie credits include 1918 (1985) On Valentine's Day (1986), Courtship (1987), and Convicts (1991), which he adapted from his plays; the 1992 Of Mice and Men with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, which he adapted from the John Steinbeck novel; and the 1985 big-screen version of his TV play The Trip to Bountiful, which won Geraldine Page an Academy Award for Best Actress. For TV, he turned out scripts adapted from Faulkner (1987's Old Man, 1980's Barn Burning), Flannery O'Connor (1977's The Displaced Person), and his own plays (1996's Lily Dale, 1992's The Habitation of Dragons). Throughout all this time, he maintained a presence on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in regional theater; he was working on a production in Hartford, Connecticut at the the time of his death. He won a Pulitzer in 1995 for his play The Man from Atlanta. His last Broadway opening was Dividing the Estate, which played from November of 2008 through last January. Foote is survived by the four children he had with his late wife Lillian Vallish Foote: Horton, Jr. and Hallie, actors who both appeared in their father's film projects; Daisy, a playwright; and Walter, a director. He and Lillian were married from 1945 until her death in 1992.