Bo Goldman, who toiled in obscurity for more than a decade while trying to make it as a playwright, then turned to movies in a screenwriting career highlighted by his Oscar-winning work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Melvin and Howard,” died July 25 in Helendale, Calif. He was 90.

His daughter Mia Goldman said he had been in declining health but did not cite a specific cause. Goldman had lived in Rockport, Maine, before moving to Helendale earlier this year to be with his son Justin Ashforth, who served as his caretaker.

Goldman was one of the most acclaimed screenwriters of the 1970s and ’80s, known for crafting original, humanistic stories that explored characters’ messy inner lives, including their hopes, dreams and disappointments. His credits included the show business saga “The Rose” (1979), the divorce drama “Shoot the Moon” (1982) and the romantic fantasy “Meet Joe Black” (1998), which starred Brad Pitt as the golden-haired embodiment of Death itself, informing an aging Anthony Hopkins that the end is near.

“It’s hard to let go, isn’t it?” says Hopkins’s character, a media mogul with a bad heart. “Well, that’s life,” he adds. “What can I tell you.”

In 2017, New York magazine polled more than 40 screenwriters to compile a list of the 100 greatest in the history of their craft. Goldman came in at No. 28, a few places above John Hughes and Mel Brooks, and drew praise from “Forrest Gump” screenwriter Eric Roth, who noted “his understanding of social mores, his ironic sense of humor, and his outright anger at being human.”

“His words were silk, never wasted or misplaced,” Roth told the magazine, “and he would throw away what others would consider glorious and did it all without a moment’s fanfare.”

Growing up, Goldman was more interested in theater than film, with dreams of becoming “the next Oscar Hammerstein.” His father produced Broadway plays, and on Saturday afternoons the family would pile into a Checker Cab outside their Park Avenue apartment, making their way to matinees where a young Goldman would sit perched on his mother’s lap, feet from the stage.

At 26, he appeared on the verge of a breakthrough when his musical “First Impressions” (1959), a “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation that he co-wrote with George Weiss and Glenn Paxton, ran on Broadway for two months. But that was followed by 16 years in the wilderness, as Goldman tried and failed to mount another musical, this one set during the Civil War.

“He was absolutely miserable,” his daughter recalled in a phone interview. “He went into analysis, and that saved him for a bit. It grounded him, but he was going insane. He had insomnia, and would wake up at 2 in the morning and would write for four or five hours, starting with stream-of-consciousness, writing whatever words came into his head.”

At a friend’s suggestion, he began writing for the movies, developing a screenplay about a tumultuous marriage – the basis for “Shoot the Moon” – that attracted the attention of Hollywood directors. One, Milos Forman, passed on the project but hired Goldman to work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), a countercultural touchstone of the New Hollywood era.

Based on a best-selling 1962 novel by Ken Kesey, the film starred Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy, a rebellious convict who avoids hard labor by pretending to be insane, and winds up at a mental institution led by the tyrannical Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). The movie grossed more than $160 million at the box office (about $940 million in today’s money) and won five Academy Awards, including best picture, director, actor and actress.

Goldman shared the Oscar for best adapted screenplay with Lawrence Hauben, an actor and screenwriter who had been previously hired to work on the film. Their screenplay shifted the novel’s point of view from “Chief” Bromden, a Native American patient played by Will Sampson, to McMurphy, whom Goldman described as his on-screen alter ego.

“I am McMurphy: an outsider, tolerated perhaps but not really equipped to cope with life as it presents itself,” he told Double Exposure, a film journal.

Goldman also identified strongly with Melvin Dummar, the Utah gas station owner who claimed to have encountered billionaire Howard Hughes one night in the desert, and who later alleged to have found a will granting him a fraction of the billionaire’s estate. The will was ruled inauthentic, but the story inspired Goldman’s screenplay for “Melvin and Howard” (1980), directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Paul Le Mat and Jason Robards.

“Melvin was a loser, and that’s how I felt after those years of trying to get the second musical on Broadway,” said Goldman, who researched the screenplay in part by spending three weeks with Dummar, retracing the steps of his alleged journey with Hughes.

The film brought Goldman his second Oscar – Mary Steenburgen also won for playing Dummar’s first wife – and was named the best movie of the year by the National Society of Film Critics.

Goldman received one more Oscar nomination, for “Scent of a Woman” (1992), about a blind, rage-filled former Army officer (Al Pacino) and his teenage assistant (Chris O’Donnell).

The film was based on an Italian movie, “Profumo di donna” (1974), but once again Goldman brought a personal touch to the story, creating the Pacino character while drawing on memories of three people: his father, one of his brothers and a sergeant he met while serving in the Army after college.

“If there is a train of thought which runs through my work,” he told The Washington Post in 1982, “it is a yearning, a longing to make the people real and capture their lives on the screen.” That wasn’t to say it was easy. Capturing life in art, he added, was “like trying to catch starlight.”

The fourth of five children, Robert Spencer Goldman was born in Manhattan on Sept. 10, 1932. His grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

His father, Julian, rose from poverty on the Lower East Side to build a chain of more than 70 clothing stores. He owned a stable of horses in Chantilly, France, and for a time he was a legal client of future president Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose wife, Eleanor, made baby booties for Goldman and his siblings, according to the family. His mother, the former Lillian Levy, was a hat model who developed Parkinson’s disease when Goldman was 12.

By then, the family’s fortune had been virtually wiped out by the Depression, although Goldman was still able to study at the Dalton School, Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1953 and wrote shows for the Triangle Club theater troupe.

When a typo in a school newspaper article rendered his first name as Bo instead of Bob, Goldman decided the name suited him. And when his roommate Thomas Hoving, the future director of the Museum of Modern Art, began dating a young woman named Mab Ashforth, Goldman decided he had found his soul mate.

He and Ashforth began dating, to the surprise of Hoving (who remained a friend) and to the dismay of Ashforth’s patrician family (who traced their lineage to the Mayflower). When he and Ashforth married in 1954, they “became bohemians,” his daughter said, “completely off on their own. Struggling with money, living life to the hilt, borrowing from rich friends from Princeton.”

They lived in New York City and on the East End of Long Island, housesitting for friends such as author Peter Matthiessen, while Goldman worked on his plays. Occasionally he found work on television, writing for shows including “Playhouse 90,” where he found a mentor in producer Fred Coe.

His later credits included the films “Swing Shift” (1984), “The Flamingo Kid” (1984), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “City Hall” (1996), which reunited him with Pacino. He also did uncredited script work on “Dick Tracy” (1990) and “The Perfect Storm” (2000).

Goldman was supported for many years by his wife, who sold homemade toys, ran a nursery school out of their living room and opened a specialty food store called Loaves and Fishes in Sagaponack, N.Y. They later moved to Napa Valley and then to Maine, where they lived with their daughter Serena Rathbun, a costume and production designer, and her husband, Todd Field, the director of “Tár.”

Several of their six children followed Goldman into show business, although the family connection was not always clear: During the lean years, his wife grew angry at Goldman, according to his daughter Mia, and decided to give some of their children her parents’ last names, instead of his own.

Mab Ashforth died in 2017. In addition to Mia, Serena and Justin, survivors include two other children, Amy Goldman and Diana Rathbun; a brother; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. A son, Jesse Ashforth, died in 1981.

Family “really is the most important expression of art,” Goldman once said. “Many men and women go to their graves without any of the kind of sweet recognition that some artists get, but having lived very artistic lives by raising children and being good husbands and wives. To me,” he added, “that’s the most artful and inventive thing you can do with your life.”