Hopscotching Demme directed classic dramas
NEW YORK — Jonathan Demme, the filmmaker behind Oscar winners The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, and the director of one of the most seminal concert films, Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, has died. He was 73.
Demme’s publicist, Annalee Paulo, said Demme died Wednesday morning in his New York apartment, surrounded by his wife, Joanna, and three children. Demme died from complications from esophageal cancer, she said.
Demme broke into moviemaking under the B-movie master Roger Corman in the early 1970s, and his prodigious, wide-ranging body of work always kept the spirited, agile curiosity of a lowbudget independent filmmaker. His hopscotching career spanned documentaries, screwball comedies and tales of social justice.
The Silence of the Lambs, the 1991 thriller starring Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and Jodie Foster as an FBI analyst, earned Demme 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 crisis. It remains a landmark film in the portrayal of gay life and injustice.
Hopkins, Foster and Hanks won Academy Awards for their performances from those films. Demme’s sensitive, alert eye helped to produce countless other acclaimed performance, too, from Melanie Griffith (Something Wild) to Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married).
“I am heartbroken to lose a friend, a mentor, a guy so singular and dynamic you’d have to design a hurricane to contain him,” Foster said in a statement. “Jonathan was as quirky as his comedies and as deep as his dramas.”
Demme last year released his latest concert film, Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids, on Netflix. Timberlake, a fan of Stop Making Sense, sought out Demme to direct it. Demme’s last fictional film, Ricki and the Flash, starred Meryl Streep as an aging rocker.
Robert Jonathan Demme was born on Long Island on Feb. 22, 1944. His father was a press officer in the travel industry. Demme’s breakthrough came with the Oscar-nominated Melvin and Howard (1980), starring Jason Robards as the billionaire Howard Hughes.