Charles Shyer, who has died aged 83, co-wrote a string of bubbly and often female-focused comedies with his second wife, Nancy Meyers. The couple, so closely linked that they were known affectionately in the industry as the Shmeyers, were not yet married when their first script together turbo-boosted Goldie Hawn’s career: the star found her biggest success playing a pampered young widow duped into joining the army in Private Benjamin (1980), which Shyer and Meyers also produced.

The screenplay, co-written with Harvey Miller and nominated for an Oscar, had been turned down by most of Hollywood. In the wake of its success, an executive at Paramount, which had rejected the script, sent Shyer a letter admitting: “When we fuck up, we fuck up big.”

Later hits included two remakes: Father of the Bride (1991), starring Steve Martin as a flustered, worrywart patriarch, and The Parent Trap (1998), with Lindsay Lohan in the Hayley Mills dual roles as twins plotting to get their estranged parents back together. The latter marked Meyers’s directorial debut. The former, directed by Shyer, represented “recycling at its best” according to the New York Times.

Shyer had doubled as director for the first time on his and Meyers’s most sophisticated film, Irreconcilable Differences (1984), loosely inspired by the breakdown of the director Peter Bogdanovich’s marriage to the producer and writer Polly Platt after his affair with Cybill Shepherd. The Shepherd role was played by a young Sharon Stone.

The picture begins with a 10-year-old girl, played by Drew Barrymore, consulting a lawyer about filing for divorce from her warring screenwriter parents (Ryan O’Neal and Shelley Long). From this unlikely premise, Shyer and Meyers built a film of stinging humour and surprising depth. O’Neal admired the script so much that he waived his fee when it seemed the project might otherwise collapse.

It was the first of several pictures of theirs with an autobiographical component. They admitted that some of the on-screen discord was drawn from their own relationship. “We have experienced to some extent Chuck getting credit for things we both do,” Meyers said in 1984, citing “irritating” references in the French press to “cinéma du Charles Shyer”.

She also revealed that “in the beginning of our movie collaborations, honchos would direct questions at Charles. And when I would answer, they would pretend not to hear me.”

Irreconcilable Differences flopped commercially (some blamed the off-putting title) but the duo were back on top with Baby Boom (1987), directed by Shyer and starring Diane Keaton as a management consultant saddled with an orphaned infant. Shyer and Meyers had it written into their contract that no other writers could be brought in to work on the script, which they sold to 20th Century Fox for $1m.

Keaton responded gloriously to the spontaneity of her young co-stars (the infant role was shared between twin girls). But their unpredictability caused repeated production delays; one shot of a child bending a pair of sunglasses on cue took three weeks to nail. “I got a little perverse joy when [studio executives] came on set in their suits, asking: ‘Why are you behind?’” Shyer said. “And I’d just point to this 13-month-old and say, ‘Her’.”

Once again, the inspiration for the script came from the couple’s life. “Certainly, being a parent in the 1980s was the genesis for this idea,” Shyer said in 1987. “Trying to juggle being a good parent and trying to do our work effectively.”

The failure of I Love Trouble (1994), which again addressed the complexities of working in the same profession as one’s spouse, was widely attributed to the mutual antipathy between the picture’s stars, Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte, who played rival journalists chasing a scoop. Disney also tried to turn the picture from a romantic comedy to a thriller in the editing. “The film couldn’t be more aptly named,” concluded the LA Times.

The pair returned to safer ground with Father of the Bride Part II (1995), directed by Shyer. But The Parent Trap was to be their final collaboration. “We broke up around 100 people on the set,” Meyers said. “It was an unhealthy dose of togetherness.”

After they divorced in 1999, Meyers became a successful film-maker in her own right. Her films include It’s Complicated (2009) starring Meryl Streep as a divorcee who has an affair with her ex-husband, played by Alec Baldwin. Meyers admitted she based some of the ex-husbands in her films on Shyer.

“The affair never happened in real life,” she wrote in 2020, “but the repartee between Meryl and Alec, that familiar, fun, sarcastic vibe – the easy laughter that quickly turns distant – that’s kind of us.” She added: “I don’t think Charles liked that I wrote something based on us. Ten years later, he has still never mentioned that one to me.”

They had met in the early 70s when he and another writer were working on a script for the producer Ray Stark. Meyers, who was then Stark’s assistant, was assigned to oversee them. “At one point, she left the room and I missed her,” Shyer recalled.

He was born in Los Angeles to Lois (nee Jones) and Melville, a film-maker who worked with DW Griffith, WC Fields and Fritz Lang, and co-founded the DGA (Directors Guild of America).

Educated at UCLA, Shyer made his way through the ranks of the film and television industry, enrolling in an early incarnation of the DGA training programme. He was an uncredited trainee assistant director on Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966) and spent many years writing for the producer and director Garry Marshall on sitcoms including The Odd Couple and Happy Days.

Shyer moved into film with writing credits on the action caper Smokey and the Bandit (1977), the comic western Goin’ South, which was directed by its star, Jack Nicholson, and the comedy House Calls (1978) starring Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson.

Along with Miller, Shyer and Meyers earned a story credit on a second Goldie Hawn vehicle, Protocol (1984), in which the actor’s ditsy persona was transplanted to the world of international politics and diplomacy.

Shyer’s projects without Meyers were markedly less assured. These included the period drama The Affair of the Necklace (2001), starring Hilary Swank, and a 2004 remake of the bachelor comedy Alfie, transposed to Manhattan with Jude Law in the Michael Caine role, which the Observer’s Philip French described as “rarely amusing”. Shyer co-wrote two festive-themed movies, The Noel Diary (2022) and Best. Christmas. Ever! (2023), and directed the former.

He and Meyers remained close friends, and she was so protective of him that she specifically asked Daphne Merkin, a New York Times reporter who was interviewing her, not to quiz Shyer about the work he had done since their divorce. “Meyers has clearly flourished, while Shyer has stalled,” Merkin noted.

Not all his achievements, however, could be measured in box office grosses. Beginning with Private Benjamin, his work with Meyers championed women on and off screen in a way that was as progressive as it was lamentably unfashionable. “Chuck could see the writer in me,” Meyers said. “He has this way of encouraging writers, women or men, and how many women get encouraged in this community?”

He was married and divorced three times; first to the actor Diana Ewing. from 1969 to 1974; then in 1980 to Meyers, with whom he had two daughters, Annie and Hallie; his third marriage, from 2004 to 2009, was to Deborah Lynn, and they had a son and a daughter, Jacob and Sophia. He is survived by his four children.

• Charles Richard Shyer, film director, producer and screenwriter, born 11 October 1941; died 27 December 2024