won the Obie Award for Best Play. Horovitz divided his time between the US and France, where he often directed French-language productions of his plays. On his 70th birthday, Horovitz was decorated by the French government as Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The 70/70 Horovitz Project was created by NYC Barefoot Theatre Company to celebrate Horovitz's 70th birthday. During the year following March 31, 2009, 70 of Horovitz's plays had productions and/or reading by theatre companies around the globe, including the national theatres of Nigeria, Benin, Greece and Ghana. He is the most-produced American playwright in French theatre history. In 1979 Horovitz founded the Gloucester Stage Company in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and continued to serve as its artistic director for 28 years. He also founded The New York Playwrights Lab in 1975, and served as the NYPL's artistic director. He was co-director of Compagnia Horovitz-Paciotto, an Italian theatre-company that produces Horovitz's plays, exclusively. In addition, Horovitz was one of a select group of non-actors awarded membership in The Actors Studio. Horovitz had a long-term friendship with Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and often found in Beckett a thematic and stylistic model and inspiration for his own work. Horovitz has also worked with The Byre Theatre of St Andrews, Scotland. Film career His screenplay for the 1982 film Author! Author!, starring Al Pacino, is a largely autobiographical account of a playwright dealing with the stress of having his play produced on Broadway while trying to raise a large family. Other Horovitz-penned films include the award-winning Sunshine, co-written with Istvan Szabo (European Academy Award – Best Screenplay), 3 Weeks After Paradise (which he directed and in which he starred), James Dean, an award-winning biography of the actor, and The Strawberry Statement (Prix du Jury, Cannes Film festival, 1970), a movie adapted from a journalistic novel by James Simon Kunen that deals with the student political unrest of the 1960s. Horovitz adapted his stage play My Old Lady for the screen, which he directed in summer, 2013, starring Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Dominique Pinon. The film was released in cinemas worldwide in fall 2014. Awards He has won numerous awards for his work, including two Obies, the Drama Desk Award, The European Academy Award – Best Screenplay (for Sunshine), and The Sony Radio Academy Award (for Man In Snow on BBC-Radio 4). He also won an Award in Literature