Leopoldo Serran, screenwriter, at 66

NEW YORK - Leopoldo Serran, a screenwriter who adapted the novels of his Brazilian countryman Jorge Amado for the movies and who worked with the directors Carlos Diegues and Bruno Barreto in bringing Brazilian films to American audiences, died Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 66.

The cause was liver cancer, a spokesman for the Ipanema Hospital in Rio said.

Mr. Serran's best-known work was "Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos" ("Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands"), a 1976 film written with Barreto and Eduardo Coutinho. It was based on Amado's most popular novel, a comedy about a widow whose second husband is so pallid in bed that she wills her brutish first husband back to life to have sex with her.

Directed by Barreto, "Dona Flor" introduced American audiences to the Brazilian star Sonia Braga. The three worked together again in 1983 on "Gabriela, Cravo e Canela" ("Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon"), based on an Amado novel of the same name, about an innocent girl, a kind of wild child, who is hired to work in the kitchen of a restaurant and becomes an object of desire for all the men in town.

In 1997, from a script by Mr. Serran, Barreto directed "O Que E Isso, Companheiro?" ("Four Days in September"), a political thriller based on a true story about the kidnapping of an American ambassador to Brazil (played by Alan Arkin).

Mr. Serran's first film, written with Diegues and others, was "Ganga Zumba" (1963), a fictionalized Brazilian history lesson set in the 17th century about the flight of slaves from a sugar cane plantation. It was directed by Diegues, a friend from college and a member of the Cinema Novo movement, a collection of politically engaged and technically experimental filmmakers that provided Brazilian film with a signature contemporary idiom.

Mr. Serran and Diegues collaborated again on the 1966 film "A Grande Cidade" ("The Big City"), an ironic fable about life in Rio as seen through the experiences of four young people, and in 1979 on "Bye Bye Brasil," which is about a troupe of ragtag performers traveling in Brazil and encountering distressing modernizations that threaten their way of life.

"As the major screenwriter of the Cinema Novo movement, Leopoldo was the father of all Brazilian contemporary screenwriters," Diegues said in a telephone interview on Friday.

Leopoldo Augusto Bhering Serran, the son of a navy admiral, was born and grew up in the Ipanema section of Rio de Janeiro. He studied to be a lawyer at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro, where he met Diegues and other filmmakers.