Robert Benton, Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Kramer vs. Kramer, dies aged 92

Australia Broadcast Center

13-05-2025

Robert Benton, the Oscar-winning writer and director of Kramer vs. Kramer, has died aged 92.
Benton's son, John Benton, said that he died on 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 co-wrote Arthur Penn's groundbreaking crime thriller Bonnie and Clyde, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, with David Newman.
But it is his script and direction on Kramer vs. Kramer — the 1979 film that offered an unflinching look at divorce and went on to become one of the most awarded films of its time — that he is arguably best known for.
The movie picked up nine Oscar nominations and brought home five: Benton's Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as Best Actor for Dustin Hoffman, Best Supporting Actress for Meryl Streep and the year's grand prize of Best Picture.
Benton was also widely appreciated by actors as attentive and trusting, and directed Oscar-winning performances by Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Sally Field.
But despite coaxing winning performances out of a host of 20th-century legends, Benton was known in Hollywood as a self-effacing director.
"I have found actors — through luck, through the judgement of casting directors or through my own instinct — that are extraordinarily good," he told the crowd.
"There's a thing you've just got to gamble with, and when you see it and it works, it's brilliant."
Asked how he got some of Tinseltown's biggest stars to perform for him, he deadpanned: "I tried not to get in their way … that's not so easy."
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 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.
Over the following decade, none of Benton's films approached the same impact, although he continued to have critical and commercial success.
His writing credits included Superman and What's Up, Doc? and he directed and co-wrote The Late Show, a melancholy comedy for which his screenplay received an Oscar nomination.
But 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.
"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.
"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 10 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."
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.
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.
The filmmaker studied at the University of Texas and Columbia University, then served in the US Army from 1954 until 1956.
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.
The filmmaker is survived by his son. His wife of six decades, Sallie, died in 2023.
AP/AFP