Frank De Felitta, American author and screenwriter, Died at 94

Frank Paul De Felitta was born on August 3, 1921, in The Bronx, New York City, New York and died on March 29, 2016.

He was an author, producer, pilot and film director.

Frank was most well known for his novels Audrey Rose and The Entity.

Frank De Felitta served as a pilot in World War II and in 1945 returned to New York, where he began to write scripts.

His first job for the weekly radio program The Whistler, a popular thriller series, earned him $350 and started him on his writing career.

Frank De Felitta continued to write radio scripts before turning to television, in which he was successful as a writer, producer, and director, winning Emmy nominations in 1963 and 1968 for his documentaries as well as a Peabody Award and several Writers Guild nominations.

Then by the early 1970s, Frank moved on to work on film scripts, including two he wrote with Max Ehrlich, The Edict (1971), The Savage is Loose (1974), and the Edict was filmed as Z.P.G. (1972), and both it and The Savage is Loose were published as novels by Max Ehrlich.

His first ever novel, Oktoberfest (1973), a thriller, though not a bestseller nonetheless earned him enough to finance the year and a half he devoted to his next novel, Audrey Rose (1975).

The novel was a horror story involving reincarnation, was a smash bestseller, selling more than 2.5 million copies and spawning a successful 1977 film adaptation (scripted by De Felitta) and a sequel, For Love of Audrey Rose (1982).

Next his novel The Entity (1978), based on the real-life case of a woman named Doris Bither who claimed to have been haunted by a spectral rapist, was also a bestseller and was adapted by De Felitta for a 1982 film starring Barbara Hershey.

His other successes include Golgotha Falls (1984) and the horror film Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981), directed by De Felitta.

He was fighting dementia when he passed.

Frank De Felitta passed away at 94 yrs old.