Bill Kerby was an American screenwriter who wrote the first draft of The Rose, the 1979 film starring Bette Midler that became one of the defining films of its era, earned four Academy Award nominations, and launched Midler’s film career; who wrote Hatfields and McCoys, the 2012 television miniseries starring Kevin Costner that became the most watched miniseries in cable television history at the time of its broadcast; and who won a Writers Guild of America Award and received an Emmy nomination for that later achievement. He died on 13 August 2026 in hospice care on Whidbey Island in Washington State at the age of 88 after a fall and a fracture.
He was born William Kerby on 13 December 1937 in Buffalo, New York. He served in the United States Marine Corps from 1955 to 1958, the period of the Korean War’s aftermath and the early Cold War when military service remained a common path for young American men. After his discharge he earned a Bachelor of Arts from Kent State University in 1962 and then a Master of Fine Arts in screenwriting from the UCLA School of Film, Television and Radio in 1969, a graduate programme whose Louis B. Mayer grant supported his completion of the degree, giving him a formal professional formation in the craft of feature film writing during one of the most fertile decades in American cinema.
He wrote The Last American Hero in 1973, the biographical drama about stock car racing driver Junior Johnson, and The Gravy Train in 1974, a crime comedy, before his most significant feature credit came with The Rose. The film, loosely based on the life and death of Janis Joplin, followed a self-destructive rock and roll singer through the collapse of her personal life and career. Midler’s performance was the centre of the film and earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress; the film also received nominations for Best Supporting Actor, Best Editing, and Best Sound. Kerby wrote the original draft that initiated the project, and after a Writers Guild of America arbitration process that reviewed the contributions of all writers who worked on the screenplay, he retained sole story credit, a recognition of the originality of his underlying material. He also wrote Hooper in 1978, the action comedy starring Burt Reynolds as an aging stuntman.
His television work in the following decades included episodic writing and development work, and his late career achievement, the three-part Hatfields and McCoys miniseries for the History Channel in 2012, was the most watched programme in cable television history at the time it aired. The dramatisation of the feud between the Hatfield and McCoy families along the Kentucky-West Virginia border following the Civil War starred Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton and drew audiences that surpassed all previous cable records. He received a WGA Award for Best Longform Teleplay and an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries for that work, recognitions that arrived forty years after his film career had begun. He was 88 years old.