Eric Roth

Eric R. Roth, born March 22, 1945, in New York City, is an American screenwriter whose work has been closely tied to major American films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He was born into a Jewish family and raised in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. His mother, Miriam “Mimi” Roth, was a teacher, studio executive, and radio writer; his father, Leon Roth, was a university teacher and film producer. From early on, Roth’s life sat near education, storytelling, and film.

Roth attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating in 1966, and later studied at UCLA Film School as part of the class of 1973. He also grew up boxing, and he later credited some of his success to habits learned from the sport. That detail helps explain the discipline behind a long writing career. Roth is also known for a working method that resists the speed of the digital age: he writes scripts in an obsolete MS-DOS application called Movie Master, without Internet access, and distributes scripts only in hard copy formats.

Forrest Gump made Roth one of the most recognized screenwriters of his generation. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the 1994 film, and he went on to receive five more nominations in that category: for The Insider in 1999, Munich in 2005, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008, A Star Is Born in 2018, and Dune in 2021. He also earned a Best Picture nomination for producing Mank in 2020.

Beyond those nominations, Roth worked on the screenplays for other Oscar-nominated films, including Ali in 2001, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close in 2011, and Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023. In 2026, he made his playwriting debut on London’s West End with his stage adaptation of High Noon. Across these credits, his work often sits inside large stories about public lives, private cost, memory, loss, ambition, and the pressure of history.

Roth has described The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as “my most personal movie” because he lost both of his parents while writing it. His own life has also included serious financial loss: he was one of the investors defrauded by Bernard Madoff in a Ponzi scheme via Stanley Chais, and he said the losses were heavy and included his retirement money. Roth lives in Santa Monica, California. He has five children, including documentary filmmaker Vanessa Roth and filmmakers Geoffrey Roth and Alec Roth, as well as six grandchildren.

For a quotes website, Roth’s words carry weight because they come from a writer who has spent decades shaping stories about choices, time, and consequence. His line from Forrest Gump, “Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss,” fits the career of a screenwriter whose best-known work has often turned on chance, regret, and what people do with the lives in front of them.