Idiosyncratic director Nicolas Roeg dies at 90
LOS ANGELES – Director and noted cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, whose offbeat films included Performance, Don’t Look Now, The Witches and The Man Who Fell to Earth, has died. He was 90.
His son Nicolas Roeg Jr. told the BBC his father died Friday night.
A daring and influential craftsman, Roeg’s idiosyncratic films influenced filmmakers including Danny Boyle and Steven Soderbergh.
He worked his way up from the bottom of the business, and by the 1960s was much in demand as a cinematographer, responsible for the lensing of films including Petulia, Far From the Madding Crowd and Fahrenheit 451.
The controversial, oddly compelling Mick Jagger-starring Performance, which Roeg codirected with Donald Cammell, was almost not released and then was recut by Warner Bros.; execs at the studio found it incomprehensible as a gangster thriller. It was eventually recut, released in 1970 to modest business and decades later received widespread acclaim as a classic of British cinema.
Its fractured narrative showed the influence of Richard Lester, as well as Jean-Luc Godard and other European auteurs of the era, though Roeg was to work with a consistently darker palette and on a deeper psychological level.
It also defined Roeg as a director to watch. His subsequent directorial outings such as Walkabout, Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie, evidenced strong development in his style. Each was a compelling, idiosyncratic tale with highly stylized performances – and beautiful, moody cinematography.
When his first post-Witches film, Cold Heaven, didn’t make an impression, he returned to television with TV movies, including 1993’s Heart of Darkness, 1995’s Full Body Massage and 1996’s Samson and Delilah as well as the 1989 television adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth, with Elizabeth Taylor. His 1996 BBC Films-produced drama Two Deaths, about the Serbo-Croatian conflict, was well received, though it received scant distribution.
His first big-screen effort in more than a decade, 2007’s Puffball: The Devil’s Eyeball, was little seen.
In 1994 Roeg was made a fellow of the British Film Institute, an award presented to individuals in “recognition of their outstanding contribution to film or television culture.” The London Film Critics Circle presented Roeg with its Dilys Powell Award for Excellence in Film in 2011, and Roeg published his memoirs, The World Is Ever Changing (Faber and Faber), in 2013.
(Variety.com/Reuters)