Akiva Goldsman

Highest Rated: 88% Back to the Outback (2021)

Lowest Rated: 8% Rings (2017)

Birthday: Jul 7, 1962

Birthplace: New York, New York, USA

Perhaps no other screenwriter in the annals of Hollywood history had as varied a career as Akiva Goldsman. For the first decade of his life as a film scribe, Goldsman collaborated with Joel Schumacher on some of the director's more derided films, including "Batman Forever" (1995) and the universally lambasted "Batman & Robin" (1997). Despite the financial success of both movies, Goldsman was trapped in a cycle of taking any job that came his way, rather than putting pen to paper on the stories he wanted to write. By the time the millennium rolled around, Goldsman was one of the top scribes working in the business, thanks in part to a lucrative side business as an uncredited writer-for-hire. But he finally received the respect he deserved when he became a member of the power trio that included director Ron Howard and star Russell Crowe on "A Beautiful Mind" (2001), which earned Goldsman his first Academy Award win. Following another critically acclaimed Howard-Crowe-Goldsman collaboration on "Cinderella Man" (2005), he baited controversy with successful adaptations of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" (2006) and "Angels and Demons" (2009), both of which confirmed that he was the top working screenwriter of his day.