Pat Conroy

Considered one of the finest Southern writers of his generation, author Pat Conroy's tales of domineering fathers and dysfunctional families provided material for some of film's greatest actors. After an early daunting attempt at a teaching career, Conroy channeled the deeply affecting experience into the memoir The Water is Wide, which was quickly adapted as the feature film "Conrack" (1974), starring John Voight as the young author. Conroy found even greater success when he mined his difficult adolescence and frequently violent home life for a pair of novels that were each subsequently made into the films "The Great Santini" (1979) - featuring a tour de force performance by Robert Duvall - and "The Lords of Discipline" (1983), the latter inspired by Conrad's challenging time at The Citadel, a revered military college. First as a novel and then a feature film co-scripted by Conroy, "The Prince of Tides" (1991) brought the novelist the greatest critical acclaim of his career and earned an Oscar nomination for the film's star, Nick Nolte. Although Hollywood collaborations later tapered off, Conroy nonetheless continued to enthrall readers with such bestsellers as 1995's The Beach House and 2009's South of Broad. In using fiction as a means of coming to terms with an often tumultuous and painful past, Conroy allowed millions of readers and moviegoers to do the same, while still finding themselves swept away by the lyrical realism of his tales filled with love, loss and the bonds of friendship. Pat Conroy died of pancreatic cancer on March 4, 2016 at the age of 70.