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Julian Barry, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of the 1974 Lenny Bruce biopic “Lenny” starring Dustin Hoffman, has died at the age of 92, his daughter announced to The New York Times.

Born in the Bronx and a graduate of Syracuse, Barry got his start in showbiz on Broadway as an actor and stage manager, most notably in Orson Welles’ 1955 production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”

In 1969, Columbia Pictures approached Barry about writing a biopic about the life of stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, who had died of a morphine overdose three years prior. Bruce accepted, but the project fell through as Columbia fast-tracked other projects.

Not wanting to give up on the script, Barry repurposed it as a stage play and brought it to Broadway in 1971 with “Hair” director Tom O’Horgan and with Cliff Gorman as Lenny Bruce. The play “Lenny” was a success, with Gorman winning a Tony Award for for his performance.

With “Lenny” now on the map,...

Julian Barry, whose 1971 Broadway play and 1974 movie, both titled Lenny and telling the story of legendary comic Lenny Bruce, died Tuesday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 92.

His death was reported to The New York Times by his daughter Julia Barry, who said he died in his sleep and had been under medical care for congestive heart failure and late-stage kidney disease.

Although most widely known for his highly influential Bruce projects, which earned considerable acclaim for the writer and his title stars — Cliff Gorman on stage, Dustin Hoffman on screen — Barry’s career extended to other projects that caught the public’s attention in their day. He wrote Rhinoceros, the 1974 film adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s play starring Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, a movie that has grown somewhat in esteem since its initial critical dismissal, and the 1978 Faye Dunaway vehicle Eyes of Laura Mars, which has not.

On this day in history as it relates to the movies...

1828 Feral teenager Kaspar Hauser is discovered wandering Nuremberg, claiming to have been raised in total isolation. Theories abound and the story inspires many artists down the road including Werner Herzog in the film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974).

1877 Influential dancer Isadora Duncan is born. Vanessa Redgrave gets an Oscar nomination playing her in Isadora! (1968)

1886 Al Jolson is born. Will later star in the first "talkie" The Jazz Singer (1927)

1894 Silent film star Norma Talmadge is born

1897 Bram Stoker's epistolary novel "Dracula" is published. Never stops being adapted for film and television but our hearts will always belong to Francis Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) despite the aggravating double possessive

1907 John Wayne was born. Did he always talk like that?

1913 Peter Cushing is born in England. Later stars in Hammer Horror films with his irl best friend Christopher Lee, the Dracula to his Van Helsing.

Lenny Bruce: Dustin Hoffman in the 1974 Bob Fosse movie. Lenny Bruce movie review: Polemical stand-up comedian merited less timid biopic (Oscar Movie Series) Bob Fosse's 1974 biopic Lenny has two chief assets: the ever relevant free speech issues it raises and the riveting presence of Valerie Perrine. The film itself, however, is only sporadically thought-provoking or emotionally gripping; in fact, Lenny is a major artistic letdown, considering all the talent involved and the fertile material at hand. After all, much more should have come out of a joint effort between director Fosse, fresh off his Academy Award win for Cabaret; playwright-screenwriter Julian Barry, whose stage version of Lenny earned Cliff Gorman a Tony Award; two-time Best Actor Oscar nominee Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy); and cinematographer Bruce Surtees (Play Misty for Me, Blume in Love). Their larger-than-life subject? Lenny Bruce, the stand-up comedian who became one of the...

Quentin Tarantino's movie is latest twist in debate on racial epithet, but some believe controversy could help race relations

What's "the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language"? According to one of the prosecutors in the Oj Simpson trial, there was no question. It's what many still dare refer to only as "the n-word". Deputy district attorney Christopher Darden submitted that learning that a detective had uttered this six-letter abomination would strip the jury of their judicial faculties.

Elsewhere, courts have ruled that letting slip this word is as understandable a provocation to violence as dealing a physical blow. Libraries and bookshops have purged their shelves of volumes such as Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which the word appears 213 times, has been banned from many schools; to overcome this problem, a new edition was published last year with the...

Hollywood producer who helped break the male stranglehold

Laura Ziskin, who has died aged 61 from breast cancer, was an influential and widely liked Hollywood producer who presided over the breakthrough films of stars including Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Kevin Costner. She demonstrated an aptitude for shaping commercial hits, such as the Spider-Man movies, alongside riskier projects.

As a producer with a contract at Sony and the former president of Fox 2000 (a specialist division of 20th Century-Fox), she was one of the first generation of women, along with Sherry Lansing and Amy Pascal, to occupy positions of power in a male-dominated industry. "There are a good dozen women producers consistently working in features, making movies," she said in 1998. "Not one-offs, not one movie every 10 years, but consistently making movies. This is quite a change, a revolution."

Ziskin was born in the San Fernando Valley, California, and graduated in 1973 from the...