Photo: BrooksieR / CC BY-SA 2.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
William Monahan is the kind of screenwriter I deeply respect, because he came to film as a real writer first, a Boston novelist and journalist who knew the weight of a sentence. His adaptation of The Departed, reworking Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs into the rot of South Boston, won him the Academy Award and felt like a translation in the truest sense, faithful in spirit yet utterly his own. What I admire most is his ear for dialogue that smells of a specific place. Monahan reminds me that the best adaptations aren't copies, they're reincarnations carried by a writer who knows exactly where he's from.
Overview
William J. Monahan (born November 3, 1960) is an American screenwriter and novelist. His second produced screenplay The Departed (2006), an adaptation of Andrew Lau's 2002 gangster film Infernal Affairs, earned him a Writers Guild of America Award and Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- William Monahan
- Name (Japanese)
- ウィリアム・モナハン
- Reading
- うぃりあむ・もなはん
- Born
- November 3, 1960 (age 65)
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Scorpio / Rat
- Origin
- Boston, Massachusetts, United States
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- screenwriter / novelist / writer / journalist / critic
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Private
- University
- University of Massachusetts Amherst
Awards & achievements
- 2007 Academy Award for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
6. Links
Screenwriter — see all → · Novelist — see all → · More people from United States →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.