Alan Parker, director of ‘Midnight Express’ and ‘Mississippi Burning,’ dies at age 76

Alan Parker, a British director whose wildly eclectic films included a gangster musical with child actors (“Bugsy Malone”), a grim account of prison life (“Midnight Express”), a civil rights drama set in the 1960s (“Mississippi Burning”) and an upbeat tale of Dublin teenagers starting a soul band (“The Commitments”), died July 31 in London. He was 76.

The British Film Institute announced his death, citing an unspecified illness.

Parker began his career in advertising, producing print ads and television commercials that formed his apprenticeship as a director. He made 14 feature films in his career, seldom venturing down the same cinematic path twice.

He received two Oscar nominations for best director, first for 1978’s “Midnight Express” about an American serving a prison sentence in Turkey, then 10 years later for “Mississippi Burning,” about an FBI investigation of the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.

Along with dark dramas about social issues, Parker made a wide range of other films, including “Bugsy Malone” (1976), a lighthearted romp with an all-child cast portraying 1920s mobsters, featuring a 12-year-old Jodie Foster as a satin-gowned nightclub chanteuse; “Fame,” a 1980 movie musical about students at a New York performing arts high school; “Shoot the Moon,” a 1982 domestic drama about a disintegrating marriage, with Albert Finney and Diane Keaton; “Pink Floyd: The Wall,” a 1982 dramatization of a concept album by the rock group Pink Floyd, and others.