That Eric Harper
Bill Kerby, Screenwriter of “The Rose” and “Hooper,” Dies at 88
By Staff
Sept 16, 2026
An Oscar nomination for Bette Midler highlighted Bo Kerby’s long screenwriting career. Moreover, an Emmy nomination for Kevin Costner’s turn in Hatfields & McCoys followed award-season attention. His career spanned more than four decades in film and television. Kerby died on August 13, 2026, at his home on Whidbey Island, Washington. He was 88.
Born on December 13, 1937, in Buffalo, New York, Kerby served in the Marine Corps from 1955 to 1958.
Additionally, he then worked as an actor and welfare investigator in New York City.
He earned a BA from Kent State University in 1962.
Moreover, he earned an MFA from UCLA in 1969, where he studied as a Louis B. Mayer grant winner.
He later taught screenwriting at Los Angeles’s Sherwood Oaks School.
Additionally, he led the summer writers’ workshop at England’s National Film and Television School from 1985 to 1990.
Kerby’s screenwriting career began with an uncredited contribution to 1973’s The Last American Hero.
He then earned a co-writing credit on The Gravy Train in 1974.
Additionally, the breakthrough came in 1977 with Hooper, the Burt Reynolds stunt-comedy co-written by Kerby.
Another milestone followed in The Rose, the Bette Midler-led rock drama.
For that project, Kerby wrote the sole story and co-wrote the screenplay.
Earning Academy Award nominations for Midler and co-star Frederic Forrest.
Kerby’s television work proved similarly distinguished.
He wrote two episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
In 1994, he penned Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee for Turner Network Television.
Moreover, the work won honors at the American Indian Film Festival and from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
It also received a Humanitas Award nomination.
His later credits included the NBC movie Little Richard in 2000.
That same year, the Golden Globe-nominated miniseries On the Beach premiered.
Additionally, his crowning television achievement, as Bo Kerby would describe, came with History Channel’s Hatfields & McCoys.
It was a co-story credit across all three nights.
The miniseries became the highest-rated non-sports cable broadcast in television history.
The achievement earned Kerby a Primetime Emmy nomination and a Writers Guild of America Award in 2013.
Additionally, Bo Kerby (Bill Kerby)’s screenplays helped define memorable film and television projects from the 1970s through the 2010s.
His versatility across genres, from rock biopics to frontier sagas, formed work that earns recognition decades after release.
