(dpa) - Italian author and screenplay writer Ugo Pirro, whose work featured in two Oscar award-winning films - Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - has died, aged 87.
Pirro, who had been ill for some time, died Friday in his house near Rome's central Piazza del Popolo square, news reports said.
Born in 1920 in Salerno near Naples, Pirro made his film debut in 1951 with the screenplay for Attention Bandits, a World-War-II drama about Italian partisans fighting the Nazis and starring Gina Lollobrigida.
In 1968 Pirro began collaborating with director Elio Petri and the two have worked on several well-received, politically-themed films including Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.
The film - the story of a senior police officer who murders his lover and then drops self-incriminating clues towards which his colleagues are apparently blind - won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 1970.
The following year Pirro was nominated for a best-adapted- screenplay Academy Award for his work on director Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, based on Giorgio Bassani's novel of the same name.
Pirro missed out on the Oscar, but the film about an aristocratic Jewish family in Ferrara which falls victim to the Nazis captured the Academy's best-foreign-language-film award.