Gloria Katz

Gloria Katz (October 25, 1942 – November 25, 2018) was an American screenwriter and producer renowned for her collaborations with director George Lucas and her husband, Willard Huyck, on seminal films including the Oscar-nominated American Graffiti (1973) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).

Born in Los Angeles to a Jewish family and raised in Beverly Hills, Katz initially studied English at the University of California, Berkeley, before pursuing a master's degree in Russian studies at UCLA, where she shifted her focus to film after becoming intrigued by her peers' work in the medium. She met Huyck, a fellow aspiring filmmaker at USC, through mutual friends in the early 1960s, and the couple married in 1969, forming a creative partnership that spanned decades and produced one daughter, Rebecca, born in 1983.

Katz's breakthrough came with American Graffiti, a coming-of-age story set in 1962 Modesto, California, which she co-wrote with Huyck and Lucas based partly on the latter's youth; the film grossed over $140 million on a modest budget and earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Their subsequent credits included uncredited script doctoring on Star Wars (1977), where Katz helped refine Princess Leia's dialogue to make her a stronger, more independent character, as well as co-writing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which became one of the highest-grossing films of 1984 at $333 million worldwide. Later works encompassed producing and co-writing the cult sci-fi comedy Howard the Duck (1986), directed by Huyck, along with other projects like French Postcards (1979) and Radioland Murders (1994).

Katz died of ovarian cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on November 25, 2018—the couple's 49th wedding anniversary—at the age of 76, leaving a legacy as one of the few women screenwriters to achieve prominence in 1970s Hollywood.