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 the attention of American audiences, died on Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 66.

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

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 shapely 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 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).

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.