Pioneer of the offbeat thriller
Nicolas Roeg Film director BORN: AUGUST 15, 1928 - DIED: NOVEMBER 23, 2018, AGED 90
NICOLAS ROEG was the perfect example of someone who was utterly devoted to his art. He worked his way up in the film business from clapper-loader and tea boy at Marylebone Studios in London to world-class cinematographer.
Roeg was born down the road from the studios and once said this was the only reason he ended up in the industry.
His father Jack, who came from an aristocratic Dutch background, had been severely injured during the First World War and worked in the diamond trade but lost a lot of money when his investments in South Africa failed.
His mother Gertrude (née Silk) took a job in a bookshop to help financially. After prep school in Brighton, Roeg went to the Mercers’ school in the City of London before undertaking national service.
In the 1950s Roeg moved to MGM’s base at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire for two years and worked as a camera operator on numerous films, from Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure in 1959 to The Trials Of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Jazz Boat (1960).
In the 1960s, when he started to direct, and throughout the 1970s, Roeg was prolific and surprised observers by laying claim, by the end of the decade, to being Britain’s leading director.
His first foray into directing, albeit alongside the painter Donald Cammell, was on 1970 crime drama Performance (Roeg was also cameraman) which starred James Fox and Mick Jagger.
It so shocked its backers, with its graphic violence and sex scenes, that Warner Bros delayed its release for two years, ensuring it went from critical failure to cult classic.
He followed up with Walkabout, which tells of a young girl (Jenny Agutter) marooned with her brother (played by Roeg’s son Luc) in the Australian outback after their father attempts to kill them and then shoots himself.
The film was widely praised by critics, despite a lack of commercial success.
His next film Don’t Look Now was based on Daphne du Maurier’s short story of the same name and starred Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland as a couple in Venice mourning their daughter who had drowned.
It attracted scrutiny due to a sex scene between Sutherland and Christie, which was unusually explicit for the time and, which it was rumoured, involved the actors having unsimulated sex.
Other film triumphs included The Man Who Fell To Earth, starring David Bowie, and Bad Timing with Art Garfunkel as an American psychiatrist living in Vienna who has a love affair with a fellow expatriate, played by Theresa Russell, to whom Roeg was later married. Roeg’s film Insignificance imagined a meeting between Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Monroe’s second husband Joe DiMaggio and Senator Joseph McCarthy, and was screened in competition at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival and shortlisted for the Palme d’Or.
In 1983, Roeg was selected to direct an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s novel The Witches by Jim Henson. It would be Roeg’s last major studio film and proved a great success with critics, despite being a box-office failure.
Many subsequent films had minimal release or went straight to video. These included Cold Heaven and the TV movie of Heart Of Darkness, an intelligent attempt at a screen version of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel.
The subsequent Two Deaths surfaced only on late-night TV. His last feature, Puffball, in 2007, dealt with aspects of the supernatural.
Roeg is survived by his third wife, the actor Harriet Harper, whom he married in 2005, sons Luc, Waldo, Sholto and Nico from his first marriage to the actor Susan Stephen, and sons Max and Statten from his marriage to Russell.