Button man Roth loses money with Madoff

Eric Roth, the award-winning screenwriter of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which has been strongly tipped for Oscars, has emerged as one of the victims of the Bernard Madoff (pictured) fraud. Roth, 65, who won an Academy Award in 1994 for Forrest Gump, is said to have sunk most his retirement nest egg into the disgraced financier's company, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC.

"I'm the biggest sucker that ever walked the face of the Earth," the writer told the Los Angeles Times. Roth will not say exactly how much he lost in Madoff's $50bn pyramid scheme, only that his losses are "massive". However, the screenwriter, who learnt of his misfortune on the same day he heard he'd received a Golden Globe nomination for Button - in which the lead character, played by Brad Pitt, ages backwards - does not intend letting the matter drop without a fight.

Unlike others who have lost money with Madoff - among them the film director Steven Spielberg and the billionaire owner of the New York Daily News Mort Zuckerman - Roth has filed a suit against his investment manager, Stanley Chais, in the Los Angeles County Superior Court in an attempt to get compensation.

The suit states that Chais collected "enormous fees" for managing hundreds of millions of dollars for his clients but "simply handed over these funds" to Madoff's investment firm. Roth claims that Chais had a responsibility to diversify his investments and should have been able to spot this sort of scam.