Jonathan Demme

Oscar-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs

Born: 22 February 1944 in Baldwin, New York, United States. Died: 26 April 2017 in Manhattan, aged 73.

Jonathandemme,the Oscar-winning filmmaker who observed emphatically American characters with a discerning eye, a social conscience and a rock ’n’ roll heart, achieving especially wide acclaim with The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, has died of cancer at the age of 73.

Mob wives, CB radio buffs and Aids victims; Hannibal Lecter, Howard Hughes and Jimmy Carter: Demme plucked his subjects and stories largely from the stew of contemporary American subcultures and iconography. He created a body of work – including fiction films and documentaries, drama sand comedies, original scripts, adaptationsandre makes–that resists easy characterisation.

A personable man with the curiosity gene and the whatcomes-next instinct of someone who likes to both hear and tell stories, de mme had a good one of his own, a tale in which he wandered into good fortune and took advantage of it. A former movie publicist, he had an apprenticeship in lowbudget B-movies with the producer Roger Corman before turning director. Demme became known early in his career for quirky social satires that led critics to compare him to Preston Sturges. They included Handle With Care (1977), originally titled Citizens Band, about eccentric rural Americans linked by trucks and CB radios, and Melvin and Howard (1980), a tale inspired by true events, which starred Jason Robards as the billionaire recluse Howard Hughes and Paul Le Mat as an earnest gas station owner who picks him up in the desert after Hughes has crashed his motorcycle.

Later, as a known commodity, Demme directed prestige Hollywood projects like Beloved (1998), an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel about the lingering, post-civil War psychological horror of slavery, and The Manchurian Candidate (2004), a remake of the 1962 Cold War drama of the same title about a brainwashed American prisoner of war.

Demme may be best remembered for two films from the 1990s. The first, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), was a vivid thriller based on the novel by Thomas Harris that earned five Oscars, including best picture and best director. The story is told largely from the perspective of an FBI trainee who becomes a key figure in the pursuit of a serial killer known as Buffalo Bill when she is assigned to conduct a prison interview with Hannibal Lecter, a mad and murderous psychiatrist, hoping to extract from him clues to Bill’s identity.

Lurid and titillating, the film is full of perverse details of heinous crimes and marked by a seductively ambiguous bond that forms between the young agent-to-be, Clarice Starling, and the brilliant monster Lecter. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins both won Oscars for their distinct portrayals.

Philadelphia (1993), brought to the fore a strain of advocacy otherwise evident in his documentaries about Haiti; former President Jimmy Carter; New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and his cousin, Robert W Castle, a white activist priest in Harlem.

Philadelphia starred Tom Hanks as an ambitious lawyer fired from his prestigious firm when the partners learn he has HIV, and Denzel Washington, as the scrappy independent lawyer who represents him in a suit against the firm. Hanks won an Oscar, and so did Bruce Springsteen, for the song that introduces the film, Streets of Philadelphia.

Rock music – music in general, really, but rock and its Caribbean siblings most of all – is central to many of Demme’s films. He directed the acclaimed film of Talking Heads in concert – Stop Making Sense (1984) – and his last film, Ricki and the Flash (2015), starred Meryl Streep as the aging singer of a bar band in California who is the ex-wife of a well-to-do Indianapolis businessman (Kevin Kline) and the estranged mother of their children.

“Music was my first love, movies came second,” Demme once told the New York newspaper The Soho News. In a 1988 interview, he said: “I grew up with rock ’n’ roll — literally,” adding, “The first rock song I remember was Sh-boom, and since then I’ve never stopped obsessing on at least something.”

The synchronisation with music and narrative is evident in Something Wild (1986) The movie tells the story of Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels), a straight-arrow tax consultant, who is seduced away from his humdrum office life by a charmingly flaky young woman played by Melanie Griffith. Calling herself Lulu, she inveigles him into a road trip that takes them from rebellious delight into danger and violence before its rather pallid Hollywood denouement.

What elevates the ending from disappointing sentiment to a winking, it’s-only-a-movie joy is the credit sequence, in which the singer Sister Carol sways against a graffiti -splashed wall and performs a reggae variation on the 1960s standard Wild Thing. The song was one of 49 to be featured in the movie, which also included music by Jimmy Cliff, Oingo Boingo, Fine Young Cannibals and David Byrne. ©New York Times 2017 Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

“Music was my first love, movies came second. I grew up with rock ’n’ roll – literally