Horton Foote, Oscar-, Emmy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, died Wednesday. He was 92.
Mr. Foote was best-known for his screenplays "Tender Mercies" and "Trip to Bountiful," as well as for his screenplay adaptation of the Harper Lee novel "To Kill a Mockingbird."
His prolific career spanned decades, from the early 1940s to the present, and included television, stage and screen. He worked with the great and famous, including Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page and Robert Duvall, and the not so famous, including a group of us here in Tucson.
In 1995, just after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his play "The Young Man From Atlanta," Mr. Foote was besieged with requests for appearances and interviews all over the country. Yet he kept a commitment to come to Tucson to participate in a two-day State Theatre Conference.
That weekend, he watched us work on scenes from his play "Roads to Home," kept us entertained with stories of his life and answered a few hundred questions, at least.
He called the Arizona Inn "swank," professed to being scared of the desert and the mountains, and ate a boatload of freshly peeled shrimp at local writer Patrick Baliani's house one evening.
In that and in previous and subsequent meetings with Mr. Foote, I recall a man whose simplicity, humor, antics and dialogue were straight out of one of his stories or plays.
In his small hometown of Wharton, Texas, which served as the setting for much of his work, he once jumped eagerly into the front seat of our VW van to take us on a little tour around the area.
"Go over there," he said, pointing literally across the railroad tracks. "That's the local crack house."
When he introduced us to his daughter Daisy, at that time an aspiring playwright herself, he said with a wink, "Daisy, these people are from Tucson and they are doing one of my plays. If you turn out to be any good, maybe they will do one of your plays, too, someday."
Over the years, Mr. Foote's plays — the stories and their characters — have grown from the small-time farmers and store workers going to the local dance, to the congestion and hectic life concerns of the immediately connected world.
Through it all, whether the theme was love, economics, alcoholism, sexual identity, artistic reason, age or change, they kept searching for, finding, perhaps losing, yet always loving and needing, that sense of home, family and connectedness.