A career of hits
> Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme left behind a legacy of films, including The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia as well as other documentaries
and lesbian characters.
“Jonathan taught us how big a heart a person can have, and how it will guide how we live and what we do for a living,” Hanks said. “He was the grandest of men.”
Demme’s most recent feature film was the less-well-received Ricki and the Flash, starring Meryl Streep as a divorced mum who ditches her family to follow her dream of rock-n-roll stardom, before a crisis compels her to return.
Streep said Demme had been “a big-hearted” man who fully embraced “people in need – and of the potential of art, music, poetry and film to fill that need”.
There were further tributes for the deeply-respected director, praised for his compassion and creativity, as well as recognised for highlighting causes such as the plight of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and impoverished Haiti.
Born on Feb 22, 1944, on Long Island, New York, Demme went to high school in Miami, and briefly studied chemistry at the University of Florida in the hope of becoming a veterinarian.
It was after flunking science that he turned to writing movie reviews and got a publicity job at a film company. He later met director Roger Corman, who asked if he could write a screenplay.
“I fell backwards into it almost,” he said of his career in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) in 2007.
Demme directed a total of 20 feature films and 12 documentaries, not to mention music videos, chalking up a raft of writing and production credits. Much of his work had a political or social edge.
Besides thrillers, romantic comedies and a farce about the wife of a mobster, his real love was for documentaries.
Subjects included Nelson Mandela, former president Jimmy Carter, and Bruce Springsteen.
“I’m not really in the business of making fictional films and I’m drawn to ones that I consider to be special and exciting in a certain way, and in the meantime, I’ll be perfectly happy just to make documentary after documentary,” he told NPR. But there were also flops. His 1998 movie Beloved, starring Oprah Winfrey and based on the Toni Morrison novel about a slave visited by the spirit of her dead daughter, bombed.
There were also lacklustre reviews for his 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate starring Streep and Denzel Washington, set in the 1990-1991 Gulf War.
In 2013, the Americans For Immigrant Justice charity announced that it was honouring Demme with an award for decades of tireless work on behalf of Haitian refugees and vulnerable immigrants.
In place of flowers, Demme’s family requested donations to that Florida-based
charity. – AFP