Beloved Hollywood screenwriter William Hasley has sadly died at the age of 78. The celebrity biographer, who wrote about Caitlyn Jenner, was found dead on Saturday evening (June 6) at 7pm near Runyon Canyon, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department, as reported by the New York Post. Air rescuers swarmed to the scene and attempted to revive the author but were unsuccessful, pronouncing him dead at the scene.
Other details surrounding his passing are yet to be released, according to Los Angeles County Medical Examiner records reviewed by Entertainment Weekly. Express.co.uk has contacted the Los Angeles Fire Department for a comment.
Hasley was born in the heart of Pittsburgh, PA, but soon moved to Marshall University in West Virginia to study. It’s there that he discovered a love of sport, playing football and running cross-country before moving to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood.
Some of his earliest gigs were writing for Hanna-Barbera and Filmation Studio cartoons, The Smurf and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. While working on NBC_TV’s Star Salute to the U.S. Olympic Team special, he met Jenner, who asked him to help write his biography.
The author wrote Jenner’s 1996 book, Finding the Champion Within, for Simon & Schuster. The self-help book detailed Jenner’s athletic accomplishments and aimed to use a 10-step program to ‘reboot’ the readers’ lives.
In the book, Hasley claimed that he became “fast friends” with the Olympian while he was working on a similar project before the former athlete commissioned him to write the book. Hasley went on to ghostwrite books Passion, Profit & Power for motivational speaker Marshall Sylver, and The Slight Edge for two-time Olympian Jeff Olson.
Meanwhile, Hasley’s screenwriting credits for television include Swift Justice, Ghost Stories, Murder She Wrote, Kung Fu, Young Riders and Highway to Heaven. His screenplays have been sold to 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios, Warner Bros, and Laurence Marks Productions.
Arguably, collaborating with Gerald Green and Oliver Stone on the screenplay Defiance was a major highlight of Hasley’s career, although the film never made it to screen. He also worked as an instructor at UCLA.
According to his instructor statement, his goals for his students were to help them develop their own “distinct style into a concise and creative screenplay for today’s ever-changing marketplace” and turn their “dreams into reality”. The writer was previously married to Robin Riker in the 1980s. Her most notable acting role was on The Bold and the Beautiful.