(FreedomBeacon.com)- The Horse Whisperer author Nicholas Evans died at 72 after a heart attack.
His literary agency revealed today that the best-selling author, screenwriter, and journalist passed away unexpectedly on Tuesday.
Around 15 million copies of The Horse Whisperer, released in 1995, have been sold globally. It is the best-selling book in 20 different nations.
It was Evans’ first book, which centers on a complex and gifted trainer who is brought in to nurse a severely injured teen and her horse back to health.
Due to the book’s immense popularity, Hollywood legend Robert Redford decided to adapt it for the big screen three years later. He played the leading role, and in her breakthrough role, Scarlett Johansson played young rider, Grace MacLean.
Sam Neill played her father, Robert, and Kristin Scott Thomas played her mother, Annie.
Evans was born in Worcestershire in 1950, and after attending Oxford University to study law, he earned a first-class degree.
He was a journalist for Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle.
By the 1980s, he worked for London Weekend Television, creating documentaries for The South Bank Show about Sir Laurence Olivier, Francis Bacon, and David Hockney. For the news program Weekend World, Evans made movies about American politics and the Middle East.
He once met a blacksmith and learned about horse whisperers—people who are said to be able to heal traumatized horses—while residing in the southwest of England.
The concept developed into the best-selling book, available in 36 different languages.
Writing a novel is like climbing a mountain: it’s slow and difficult, and you may easily get lost, the author claimed in November 2020.
However, thanks to The Horse Whisperer, he could see the plot unfold before him like stepping stones over a river. “Just putting one foot in front of the other was all I needed to do.”
Evans and his family had a nearly catastrophic reaction in 2008 after eating the poisonous webcap mushroom while thinking it was a harmless cep. Evans, his singer-songwriter wife Charlotte, her brother, and sister-in-law all experienced kidney failure and required dialysis.
After nearly three years on a waiting list, Mr. Evans was saved when his only daughter contributed one of her kidneys in a live donation.
