Writer Wolf Mankowitz dies, aged 73

Screenwriter, novelist and playwright Wolf Mankowitz has died aged 73 after a long illness in west Cork. Over a period of 30 years, he wrote the screenplays for many well-known films, both alone and in collaboration.

Originally a journalist, he was also a musical impresario and an expert on antiques, in addition to writing novels, plays and short stories, many of which he went on to adapt for the screen.

He made his cinema debut with an adaptation of his novel, Make Me an Offer, in 1954. The following year he wrote the urban fairytale A Kid for Two Farthings, directed by Carol Reed, and the critically acclaimed short film The Bespoke Overcoat.

He adapted his 1958 stage musical Expresso Bongo for a hit teen movie starring the young Cliff Richard. His other work in the late 1950s and early 1960s included the antiwar drama The Long and the Short and the Tall and the science fiction disaster movie The Day the Earth Caught Fire.

His best-known credit of the 1960s was probably for the 1967 James Bond movie Casino Royale, which he himself described as "a frightful mess", and for adaptations of such classics as Black Beauty and Treasure Island, collaborating on the latter with Orson Welles, a longtime friend with whom he worked on several projects.

Mankowitz moved with his wife Anne to Ireland in 1969 - largely, he admitted, to take advantage of Mr Charles Haughey's tax dispensation for artists: "The notion was that I'd reduce the amount of work I was doing," he said in 1991.

"If I didn't have to pay tax, I wouldn't have to work so much. And then, I don't know, we just stayed on and on, getting more and more related to the place."

He directed one short film himself in Ireland, an adaptation of his own play The Hebrew Lesson, about a young IRA man on the run from the Black and Tans who takes refuge in a Dublin synagogue.