Alan Sharp - Telegraph With five scripts filmed in as many years, Sharp found himself a feted talent. After The Hired Hand, acclaimed the best film of the year by the magazine Films and Filming, came a thriller, The Last Run, with George C Scott (also 1971). This was followed by two more Westerns - Ulzana's Raid (1972), starring Burt Lancaster, which rejected fashionable pieties about American Indians by recreating the full savagery of an Apache raid; and Billy Two Hats (1974), with Gregory Peck as an expatriate Scottish bank robber. Then came Night Moves (1975), starring Gene Hackman as a small-time private detective, for which Sharp, in the course of a seduction scene, scripted the exchange: He (hopefully): Why do you ask? She: Oh, I dunno; it's the one question everybody knows the answer to. After Night Moves, Sharp disappeared into the obscurity of television films and miniseries. It was another 20 years before he re-emerged with Rob Roy (1995), which starred Liam Neeson as the outlawed Highlands folk hero. Alan Sharp was born on January 12 1934 at the village of Alyth, near Dundee. His mother was unmarried and he was adopted by a Greenock shipyard worker and his wife when he was six weeks old. He left school at 14 and worked in the Clydeside shipyards before answering a newspaper advertisement for a vacancy as a private detective's assistant. But after National Service, he returned to Greenock and married the first of his four wives. He planned to train as a teacher, but when his college grant arrived he gave the money to his wife and decamped to Germany. Returning to Britain, he settled in London and launched his writing career. His television screenplay Funny Noises With Their Mouths was broadcast in 1963. Another play, A Knight in Tarnished Armour, was televised in 1965. His debut novel, A Green Tree in Gedde, the first volume of a planned trilogy, appeared in the same year. One critic declared that it "altered the face of the modern Scottish urban novel," but it was initially banned in Scotland on account of its sexual content. Sharp's second book, The Wind Shifts, was published in 1968; but the third, Don't Cry, It's Only a Picture Show, was left unfinished when Sharp emigrated to Hollywood . The American critic Walter Chaw praised Sharp's screenplays for their "narrative complexity and situations gravid with implication and doom," while Trevor Johnston of Time Out London suggested that Sharp "could well be Britain's greatest living screenwriter." For his part, the self-deprecating Sharp considered himself no more than a practitioner in pastiche. Sharp's later Hollywood credits included Sam Peckinpah's final film as a director, The Osterman Weekend (1983); the Margot Kidder comedy Little Treasure (1985), which he also directed; and Dean Spanley (2008), with Peter O'Toole and Sam Neill. He remained a restless figure, wandering between his homes in Los Angeles, New Zealand and Tighnabruaich in the Scottish Highlands. Alan Sharp had six children, including the actress Rudi Davies, his daughter with Beryl Bainbridge, the writer who used him as the inspiration for her novel Sweet William (1975), about a charming wastrel who messes up other people's lives. "I didn't exaggerate his character," recalled Beryl Bainbridge. If anything I toned him down. Alan Sharp, born January 12 1934, died February 8 2013