Don Payne, a four-time Emmy winner for “The Simpsons,” died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 48.
Don Payne, a four-time Emmy winner for The Simpsons who co-wrote the screenplay to the Thor movie and its sequel, died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles after a battle with bone cancer, according to a report by The Hollywood Reporter. He was 48.
Payne, a self-professed “comic book geek,” was also behind the scripts for My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), starring Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson, Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) and Columbia’s upcoming Maximum Ride, based on James Patterson’s young adult novel.
Payne started on The Simpsons in 1998 and wrote more than a dozen episodes of the long-running Fox series and served as a consulting producer on 100. He has two episodes in production that will air this fall in the show’s 25th season, including this year’s Christmas show, “White Christmas Blues.” He won the WGA's Paul Selvin Award in 2005 for his Simpsons script “Fraudcast News.”
Survivors include his wife Julie and three children.
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
