Mourning loss of true wordsmith

Horton Foote died Wednesday.

There are many who may not recognize the name. But many, many others are more than familiar with his work.

Horton Foote was the man who gave Atticus Finch his voice in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He was the writer who earned two Academy Awards, an Emmy and a Pulitzer Prize. He was a soft-spoken and unassuming man who came to Charlottesville in 1992 to stage one of his plays at Heritage Repertory Theatre.

In a town that prides itself in its love of the arts, Horton quietly slipped into the local theater. No one seemed to notice when he took a seat in the back of the room. He sat alone in the Helms watching and listening as patrons fixed their gaze on the professional actors in the spotlight.

Jean Stapleton, who is best known as Edith Bunker in “All in the Family,” was the center of attention. Horton also had brought in Rochelle Oliver and his oldest child, Hallie Foote, to star in “The Roads to Home,” a play he worked here before taking it Off-Broadway.

“Horton is like Eugene O’Neill,” Stapleton had said during her Charlottesville stay, but she quickly corrected her statement. “No,” she added, “he’s better.”

Horton, who liked to write about ordinary people in ordinary places, won his first Oscar for his adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel. Gregory Peck had said that “To Kill a Mockingbird” was one of his favorite films.

“Of course, Harper was their first choice,” Foote told me during an interview one sunny July afternoon. “But she didn’t want to do, so they asked me next.”

The man who said he learned to write “on the job” said that he felt it was important to “feel a kinship” with the other writer when adapting his or her work for a film. It came as no surprise that the man who grew up in a small town in Texas would strike up a friendship with Lee.

“I met with Harper and she was a lovely woman,” Foote said. “We liked each other a lot, and we became rather close friends.”

Foote said he didn’t go to the Oscars in 1963, because he didn’t think he would win.

Twenty years later he was in the audience when they read his name on the envelope. A young Robert Duvall, who played the mysterious Boo in “Mockingbird,” brought Foote’s award-winning words to life as the drunken country singer in “Tender Mercies.”

Both Foote and Duvall also came to Charlottesville later to participate in the Virginia Film Festival.

Foote’s Pulitzer followed in 1995 for “The Young Man from Atlanta,” but he seemed most proud when he spoke of his children.

Hallie and Horton Foote Jr. are actors. Daisy is a screenwriter, and Walter, the lawyer, also dabbled in show business as an executive producer.

You may even be a tad familiar with the sound of Horton Foote. He provided the voice of Jefferson Davis for Ken Burns in “The Civil War.”

Spoken or written, Horton Foote’s words will live on for generations.

Foote was 92 years old when he died in his apartment in Hartford, Conn., on Wednesday. Naturally, he was working on a collection of plays.