Only one Best Adapted Screenplay winner has also won an acting Oscar
Emma Thompson, honoured for Sense and Sensibility, stands alone among winners of this category in also holding an Oscar for performing. The award has existed since the Academy's first ceremony, and it treats every sequel as an adaptation, since a follow-up borrows the story and characters of an earlier film.
Novels are the most common raw material, but the prize also rewards scripts drawn from plays, musicals, short stories and television. Before its present name it carried a clunkier label about screenplays based on material from another medium. Joseph L. Mankiewicz became the first double winner, collecting it in 1949 and again in 1950. Michael Wilson's second win came while he was blacklisted, so novelist Pierre Boulle accepted it as a front; the Academy recognised Wilson officially some years afterwards.
Family ties run through the list. Philip G. and Julius J. Epstein won together for Casablanca, the first siblings to manage it, while James and William Goldman triumphed separately, for The Lion in Winter and All the President's Men. Sarah Y. Mason, who shared the award for Little Women with her husband Victor Heerman, was the first woman honoured for adapting existing material; Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh are the only other married pair to win.
Some victories loop back on themselves. Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather produced wins in 1972 and 1974 for Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, and books by E. M. Forster gave Ruth Prawer Jhabvala two statuettes. Larry McMurtry is unique in winning for adapting another writer, with Brokeback Mountain, and in seeing his own book turned into a winning script, Terms of Endearment. William Monahan for The Departed and Sian Heder for CODA are the only winners whose credited source was another feature film.
The age range is wide: James Ivory won for Call Me by Your Name at 89, while Charlie Wachtel of BlacKkKlansman was 32. Geoffrey S. Fletcher, winner for Precious, was the first African-American to take any writing Oscar, and Taika Waititi's award for Jojo Rabbit made him the first person of Maori descent to receive it.
Source: Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay
