Peter Stone

Peter Stone was born in Los Angeles in 1930, the son of film producer John Stone, and became one of the few writers to move fluently between Broadway, television and Hollywood screenwriting at the highest level. He remains the only writer in history to win a competitive Academy Award, a Tony Award and an Emmy Award. Stone wrote two of the sharpest vehicles of Grant's final screen decade. Charade (1963), directed by Stanley Donen, gave Grant a role built around his age rather than around it — a man aware that he is nearly two decades older than Audrey Hepburn's character and openly uneasy about it, a joke Stone wrote directly into the dialogue. Father Goose (1964) went further, casting Grant as a scruffy, drunken South Pacific island-watcher rather than a polished leading man, and it won Stone the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (shared story credit with Frank Tarloff and S. H. Barnett). Grant himself called it one of his favorite performances precisely because it broke from the tailored image Stone knew audiences expected of him. Beyond his work with Grant, Stone wrote the book for the Broadway musical 1776 (1969), which won the Tony Award, and later the screenplay for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), a tense New York subway-hijack thriller far removed in tone from his comedies. His versatility across genres and media was unusual even by the standards of prolific studio-era writers. Stone died in Los Angeles in 2003. His two Grant scripts are still regularly cited as giving the actor his best and most self-aware late material.