LOS ANGELES — Michael Crichton, the doctor-turned-author of best-selling thrillers such as “The Terminal Man” and “Jurassic Park” and a Hollywood writer and director whose credits include “Westworld” and “Coma,” has died. He was 66.
Crichton died in Los Angeles on Tuesday “after a courageous and private battle against cancer,” his family said in a statement.
For nearly four decades, the 6-foot-9 writer was a towering presence in the worlds of publishing and filmmaking.
Director Steven Spielberg in a statement Wednesday said, “Michael’s talent outscaled even his own dinosaurs of ‘Jurassic Park.’ He was the greatest at blending science with big theatrical concepts, which is what gave credibility to dinosaurs again walking the Earth.”
Crichton was still in Harvard Medical School when he wrote his first best seller, “The Andromeda Strain,” a fast-paced, scientifically detailed 1969 thriller about a team of scientists attempting to save mankind from a deadly microorganism brought to Earth by a military satellite. It was made into a movie in 1971.
With his success at writing thrillers, Crichton abandoned medicine to become a full-time writer whose novels in the ’70s and ’80s included “The Terminal Man,” “The Great Train Robbery,” “Eaters of the Dead,” “Congo” and “Sphere.”
Crichton made his feature-film directing debut in 1973 with “Westworld,” which he also wrote, about a fantasy theme park for wealthy vacationers whose fun is spoiled when malfunctioning androids turn deadly.
He directed five other movies in the ’70s and ’80s, including “Coma,” “The Great Train Robbery,” “Looker,” “Runaway” and “Physical Evidence.” As a novelist, Crichton came back stronger than ever in the 1990s with best sellers such as “Jurassic Park,” “Rising Sun,” “Disclosure,” “The Lost World,” “Airframe” and “Timeline.”
During the same decade, he co-wrote the screenplay for “Jurassic Park,” the 1993 Spielberg-directed blockbuster hit; and he co-wrote the screenplay for the 1996 action-thriller “Twister” with his fourth wife, actress Anne-Marie Martin, with whom he had a daughter, Taylor.
Crichton also created “ER,” the long-running NBC medical drama.
Dubbed “The Hit Man” by Time magazine in a 1995 story chronicling his “golden touch,” Crichton had more than 100 million copies of his books in print at the time.
When he wasn’t writing fiction, Crichton periodically turned to nonfiction, including “Jasper Johns,” a 1977 portrait of the artist; and the 1988 autobiographical book “Travels.” He also wrote a book on information technology, “Electronic Life” (1983), formed a small software company in the early ’80s, designed a computer game and shared a 1995 Academy Award for technical achievement for pioneering computerized motion-picture budgeting and scheduling.
The oldest of four children, Crichton was born Oct. 23, 1942, in Chicago and grew up in Roslyn, N.Y. He developed wide interests at an early age, he later said, recalling his mother taking her children to plays, museums, movies and concerts.
He praised his parents for not setting limits on their children’s exploration.
“They were always saying, ‘You can do that.’ So I never had the feeling there was some area that I was incompetent in,” he told Vanity Fair in 1994.
Obituaries
