The director who brought Superman to the big screen
1930–2021
Richard Donner was at home nursing a hangover when the call came in that would change his life. A veteran TV director, he’d just made his movie breakthrough with 1976’s The Omen, about parents who adopt a young boy who is secretly the Antichrist. Now he was being offered $1 million by a producer to bring the comic-book hero Superman to the big screen. After insisting on a rewrite of a script he found too cartoonish and casting an unknown Christopher Reeve in the title role, Donner struck gold with the global smash Superman in 1978. Other hits followed, including the kids’ adventure film The Goonies (1985) and Lethal Weapon (1987), the buddy-cop blockbuster starring Danny Glover and Mel Gibson that spawned three sequels. The genre-hopping director said his aim was to tell human tales, and credited Superman’s success to his insistence on playing it straight. “Anything I’ve been involved with or have been surrounded by,” Donner said, “it’s about story.” Richard Schwartzberg was born in the Bronx, where his father, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, worked for the family furniture business, said The New York Times. On visits to his maternal grand
Richard Donner
father’s Brooklyn movie theater, Richard “became fascinated by film,” but with “no specific career ambitions” he joined the Navy in his teens. He then studied business at New York University, but dropped out to try his hand at acting, adopting the stage name Donner. He landed some small roles, but quit when a director, Martin Ritt, told him, “I’d never make it as an actor because I couldn’t take direction, but he thought I could give it.” After “several years of directing commercials,” Donner moved to Los Angeles in 1959 and “made his way in television drama,” said The Times (U.K.). He directed episodes of The Twilight Zone,
Perry Mason, and Gilligan’s Island and made three unsuccessful films before finding big-screen success with The Omen.
While Donner directed few post-1980s hits, he “continued working steadily,” said The Guardian (U.K.). The production company he founded with his wife, Lauren Shuler Donner, was behind box office smashes including Free Willy (1993), X-Men (2000), and Deadpool (2016). A convivial man with an outsize personality, Donner lacked any pretense about his cinematic contributions. His sole boast: “I’m pretty good at meeting a schedule and a budget.”