The event: The 54th Academy Awards ceremony, March 29, 1982. 

The category: Best adapted screenplay.

The presenter, novelist Jerzy Kosinski, opens the envelope and announces, “The winner is . . . Ernest Thompson, for On Golden Pond.”

Thompson, then 32, jump-strides across the stage and leaps in the air with a triumphant fist pump. He kisses both Kosinski and the Oscar statuette and then launches into his acceptance speech. “I wrote On Golden Pond as a play four years ago for two reasons,” he says. “I was out of work as an actor. And I believed I had something to say and a burning need to say it.”

Forty-one years, 35 more plays, 25-plus screenplays, more than 200 songs, and a new novel later, Thompson, CAS/BA ’71, still has plenty to say—and he continues to do so at the same galloping pace. From his 40-acre farm in rural New Hampshire near where On Golden Pond was filmed, the 74-year-old writer, director, and actor divides his time among teaching, projects related to his magnum opus—which is still performed in hundreds of productions each year—and new creative endeavors, all connected by a throughline he calls the three Hs: humor, hope, and heart. 

Thompson’s burning need to express himself sparked while he was a student at AU during turbulent years on campus. The Vermont native joined the protests that took over the President’s Office Building in April 1969 and blocked traffic on the bustling Ward Circle in response to the Kent State University shootings in May 1970. “Those experiences were extremely educational for me because I learned my own form of patriotism and passion,” he says. 

When the administration agreed to student demands to dispense with core classes, Thompson worked with English professor Arthur Bean to fashion his own syllabus by reading every play written by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee. When he was passed over for drama department mainstage shows, Thompson instead staged his own innovative multimedia production of Samuel Beckett’s one-man show Krapp’s Last Tape at midnight in AU’s Clendenen Gym. His friend and drama department colleague Rae C. Wright, who now teaches film and TV at New York University, attended the show and admired his bold choice of material and willingness to experiment. “Ernest has always honored the flame of creativity in him,” the CAS alumna says. 

That show’s success “empowered me to do what I’m still doing,” Thompson says. “Every day, I still think, ‘What trouble can I make now? Where can I go next?’”

As a junior, he enrolled in a class at neighboring Catholic University through the DC university consortium to qualify to audition for a play being staged there by esteemed actor Cyril Ritchard. Ritchard not only cast him in that production but, upon his graduation, launched Thompson’s professional acting career by selecting him for the touring company of The Pleasure of His Company. AU drama professor F. Cowles Strickland encouraged Thompson’s pursuit and signed his copy of his book The Technique of Acting: “To Ernest, who came to school looking for himself and found him.”

Thompson soon found his talent for writing as well. After he joined the soap opera Somerset in 1971, older cast members encouraged him to change any lines that didn’t work for him. “I was thinking, ‘You can?’ Because I’d read my 4,000 plays, and they seemed sacrosanct to me,” he recalls. He proved so adept at writing on the spot that other actors asked him to rewrite their lines, too. 

Over the next several years, Thompson made his Broadway acting debut (Summer Brave), appeared opposite Susan Sarandon in two television films, and starred in a pair of TV series (Sierra and Westside Medical). But during Memorial Day weekend of 1978, he found himself in between acting jobs and with time on his hands to write. In three days, he crafted the first draft of On Golden Pond, his first full-length play. 

It follows Norman Thayer, a retired professor showing signs of dementia as he approaches 80, and his wife, Ethel, during their 48th summer at their beloved lake cottage on Golden Pond. After their long-estranged daughter, Chelsea, arrives with her new fiancé and his 13-year-old son, “Norman’s unfailingly mordant humor, and his spirits, take a turn for the better,” as Thompson describes.

On Golden Pond is far more than a love story and exploration of family. It’s a tribute to the lake life that Thompson had grown up with in Maine and considered increasingly under threat from commercialization. And it was far ahead of its time in its portrayal of dementia, which today affects more than 6.7 million Americans. “We’re not conscious enough of dementia’s effects, not only on the individual but on everyone around him or her,” Thompson says. “My burning need was to shine light on the matter.”

The immense star power of Jane Fonda, Henry Fonda, and Katharine Hepburn intensified the light of Thompson’s screenplay, his first. The movie received 10 Academy Award nominations; Thompson, Hepburn, and Henry Fonda all took home Oscars.

“Through the years, people have asked me, ‘Did you ever feel you had to try to top yourself?’” Thompson says. “No, I never did. Because I established that I could do it. The Oscar was a permission slip to do whatever I wanted.” 

Thompson’s subsequent plays have taken audiences on a journey comparable to the “raucous road trip” at the heart of his novel, The Book of Maps, released in October 2022, with stops both fearful and incredibly funny. In just a small sampling of his plays, characters grapple with suicide, kidnapping, and gay bashing; ingest a bizarre elixir in search of enlightenment; and find love in a colorectal clinic. In the book, father and son Brendan and Brenlyn Tibbet encounter a hungry bear, skinheads, and a pedophile along a cross-country sojourn that also includes naked kayakers, an homage to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and new nicknames, such as Pissed and Fat Chance, upon crossing each state border. 

“Humor is the great emollient,” Thompson says. “If you can make an audience laugh, you can take it anywhere.” 

Even when he writes bleak scenarios or dangerous characters, when there are “shocks to the system” in his stories, there will always be humor along the way and a ray of hope before the final page or curtain. “I don’t like anger, evil, or darkness,” he says. “It sounds really Boy Scout-ish, but that’s how I approach every day and every relationship. Hope is my life philosophy. So naturally, that is what I write about.”

Then there’s the third H, heart. “When I teach writing workshops and talk about the tenets of effective storytelling, emotion is always number one,” he says. A story must be honest, authentic, and true to the writer’s own voice. Through his numerous courses—including his popular Write On Golden Pond workshop and a series called Write Real, Act Real, and Direct Real—he’s committed to helping others find their authentic voice.

“Everybody is a storyteller,” he says. “When kids are five and six years old on the playground, they play let’s pretend. We all did. We made up stories and characters and songs. But that gets beaten out of us as we get older. . . . Most people absorb that creativity [instead of expressing it]. Where does it go? It’s still there, inside.” 

That lesson applies not just to playwrights. 

In 2018, he and his wife, writer Kerrin Thompson, launched Rescind Recidivism, a prison writing program that has offered inmates at New Hampshire correctional facilities a chance to feel constructive and respected. To break the ice for the six-week program, Thompson shares his own experiences as a storyteller and a man, his dreams, his life, and his failings. “That’s usually enough to open doors,” he says, with participants responding, “‘You think you [screwed] up; wait ’til you hear my story.’” 

The couple helps shape the participants’ biographies or specific life events into a short play format and steers them in more cohesive and positive directions to result in something more personal and authentic. Week six is showtime, when the Thompsons bring in professional actors to perform the plays. “Just seeing the look in their eyes, how important it is for them to be listened to, to be able to tell their stories, is a reward that’s ridiculously disproportionate to the amount of input,” he says.

Forty-five years after its incarnation, the play On Golden Pond continues to richly reward Thompson and audiences around the world. It has been translated into 30 languages and performed in more than 40 countries on six continents. (Russia, surprisingly, is the second-most popular market.) 

Thompson offers a couple of theories for its enduring popularity. First, “there are fathers and daughters in every culture, in every country, in every language,” he says. Second, the characters are ones that stars can age into. “Every generation, there are new actors who come along and say, ‘What is a 70-year-old woman going to play?’” he says. “That happens all over the world.”

However, the play has not remained static. “On Golden Pond has been like my own lab,” Thompson says. “I get to continue going back and revisiting it.” 

He has multitasked in several productions. In 1998, the prolific songwriter wrote the book and lyrics for Another Summer, a musical version of On Golden Pond. In 2011, he not only directed a production for the first time but wrote a song for it called “The Father Daughter Dance,” which his longtime collaborator Joe Deleault set to music and fellow Oscar winner Carly Simon recorded. “For somebody who has a hard time singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ Ernest is an amazing musical writer,” Deleault says. “His words pop off the page and sing to me.”

In 2019, Thompson directed himself and finally had the opportunity to perform the role of Norman as he’d always envisioned it. “I think Norman was that one great teacher that some of us have been lucky enough to have in our lives,” he says. “What I think a lot of actors and directors don’t understand about Norman is that he had to retire, so he lost his audience. What happens to the mind then? Because without that constant stimulation, the mind starts to atrophy.”

Thompson has no intention of retiring anytime soon. He’s currently on a book tour for The Book of Maps, with his Oscar in tow. He invites audience members to pose with it and give their own acceptance speeches. His second novel, Out Clause, will be released in 2025. He’s compiling an anthology of his short plays and trying to bring two new ones to the stage. He’s preparing to direct and act in his film Parallel America, starring Gordon Clapp of NYPD Blue fame.

He reviews every request for stage productions of On Golden Pond and has been approached about a potential Broadway revival, which would mark the play’s fourth go-round on the Great White Way. 

Thompson is also writing a film sequel to On Golden Pond, which will touch on climate change and class divide—issues amplified in recent years. The movie will also focus on a fourth H: home. During the pandemic, droves of people migrated out of cities, seeking out their own version of what Norman and Ethel had. 

“The sequel is called Home on Golden Pond because I believe each of us has a place like that in his or her heart, a place that was important to us at some point in our life or is a dream we have,” he says. 

Thompson will take us all there, with plenty of humor, hope, and heart along the way.

Thompson on Screen                                     

For a taste of Thompson’s vast oeuvre beyond On Golden Pond, settle in with these three films that he wrote and directed.

The West Side Waltz (1995)

After writing the love story in On Golden Pond, Thompson explored the flip side. “What is life without the luxury of having that one person to rely on for support?” he says. Three women of different generations—a widow, a divorcée, and one who never married—overcome their reservations and loneliness to connect with one another through music and humor. Shirley MacLaine, Liza Minelli, Kathy Bates, and Jennifer Grey star in Thompson’s television movie adaptation of his play.   

1969 (1988)

Thompson was the age of his main characters and a student at AU in the movie’s titular year and drew on his own experiences as he set them in motion (to a fantastic soundtrack featuring Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Creedence Clearwater Revival) through that turbulent time. The movie—Thompson’s directing debut—stars Robert Downey Jr., Kiefer Sutherland, and Winona Ryder during the early stages of their careers. “There’s a disconnect sometimes between the intent of a screenwriter and the results; it became frustrating to me to see the stuff that got lost in translation,” he says. “Directing was the next obvious step.” 

Out of Time (2000)

The story is an update of Rip Van Winkle, in which a man awakens after 20 years to find a town and family he doesn’t recognize. Thompson calls it “wishful filmmaking”: a man learning to become a better one, and a daughter yearning for him to return to the ideals he held in his activist youth.

Thompson in Print

While The Book of Maps is not autobiographical, let’s just say there are some shared traits between Thompson and his main character, Brendan Tibbet, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who must break the news of his impending divorce to his 10-year-old son and redeem himself in the boy’s eyes over the course of their two-week cross-country road trip.

• Thompson based the book on a road trip that he and his then 10-year-old son, August, took in 2002. 
• They both are connected to a television series shot in Yosemite National Park featuring a bear as a supporting actor. Thompson starred in Sierra, while Brendan writes for its doppelgänger the Trailkeepers.
• They both attended AU.
• They both revere Eugene O’Neill.
• They’re both terrible singers.
• They both live on farms in rural New Hampshire.
• They both are horrible company when watching a movie. “I’m often thinking, ‘Wow, that’s not how I would have done it,’ but nobody asked me,” Thompson says.
• They share a philosophy about the power of words. “We’re allotted a finite number of words in our lives and so many sentences to bend them into,” Brendan says. “Why not give them color and shape and musicality?”