Alan Parker, director of Oscarwinning dies at 76

alan Parker, a successful and sometimes surprising filmmaker whose diverse output includes Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express, and Evita, has died at 76, his family said.

A Briton who became a Hollywood heavyweight, Parker also directed Fame, The Commitments and Mississippi Burning. Together his movies won 10 Academy Awards and 19 British Academy Film Awards.

The director’s family said he died Friday in London after a long illness.

Parker was born in London on February 14, 1944, and, like many other aspiring British directors of his generation, including Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne, began his career in advertising as a copywriter and director of commercials.

He moved into television with critically acclaimed 1974 drama The Evacuees, which won an international Emmy Award.

The next year he wrote and directed his first feature, Bugsy Malone, an unusual, exuberant musical pastiche of gangster films with a cast of children, including a young Jodie Foster.

He followed that with 1978 feature Midnight Express, the reality-based story of an American’s

harrowing incarceration in a Turkish prison for alleged drug offenses. It won two Oscars - including one for Oliver Stone’s script - and gained Parker the first of two best-director nominations.

Parker was also a notable director of musicals, a genre he both embraced and expanded. Fame (1980) was a gritty but celebratory story of life at a performing arts high school; Pink Floyd - the Wall

(1982) was a surreal rock opera; The Commitments (1991) charted the ups and downs of a ramshackle Dublin soul band; and Evita

(1996) cast Madonna as Argentine first lady Eva Peron in a big-screen version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical. His final film was deathrow drama The Life of David Gale

in 2003. AP

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