‘Silence of the Lambs’ director, 73, dies
Director Jonathan Demme died Wednesday at the age of 73. His last full-length documentary was a Justin Timberlake concert film. The last scene of his final feature, Ricki
and the Flash, was Meryl Streep, as an aging rocker, bringing down the house with Tom Petty’s American Girl.
Few filmmakers have been so drawn to the marrying of music and image the way Demme, a self-avowed “fanatical rock ‘n’ roller,” was. He stuffed 49 songs into Something Wild. Springsteen’s The Streets of
Philadelphia gave his Philadelphia its melancholy heart.
The filmmaker died of complications from esophageal cancer in his New York apartment, surrounded by his wife, Joanna, and three children, said Demme’s publicist.
Demme broke into moviemaking in the early 1970s. His career spanned documentaries, screwball comedies and tales of social justice. Yet his most famous films were a pair of Oscar winners.
The Silence of the Lambs, the 1991 thriller starring Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and Jodie Foster as an FBI analyst, earned him a directing Oscar, as well as Best Picture. He followed that up with Philadelphia (1993), with Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, the first major Hollywood film to confront the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) crisis. It remains a landmark film in the portrayal of gay life and injustice, subjects Hollywood had previously largely turned a blind eye toward.
Hopkins, Foster and Hanks all earned Academy Awards for their performances in those films. Demme’s sensitive, alert eye helped produce countless other acclaimed performances, too, from Melanie Griffith ( Something
Wild) to Anne Hathaway ( Rachel Getting Married).
“Just as passionate about music as he was about art, he was and will always be a champion of the soul,” said Foster. Hanks called him “the grandest of men.” “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,” said the actor.
Martin Scorsese praised Demme’s use of music, from Buddy Holly to Miklos Rozsa. “His pictures have an inner lyricism that just lifts them off the ground—even a story like The Silence of the Lambs.”
Demme’s breakthrough came with the Oscar-nominated
Melvin and Howard (1980), starring Jason Robards as Howard Hughes. It’s about a Nevada service station owner who claims to be the beneficiary of the billionaire. From early on, music played a central role in his films, especially in 1986’s music-stuffed road-trip comedy Something Wild, in which Jeff Daniels starred as a tax consultant drawn into the wilder orbit of Melanie Griffith.
Some films were misfires. Demme’s 1988 adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, didn’t click with critics, nor did his 2004 bigbudget remake of The Manchurian Candidate. But 2008’s Rachel Getting
Married, starring Hathaway playing a young woman released from rehab for her sister’s wedding, was a return to form that seemed to combine many of Demme’s talents—his buoyant, natural humanism, his joy in music performance, his fondness for troubled outsiders.