HENRY JAGLOM
(22 June 1952 – 22 September 2025)
The American actor, film director and playwright, who has died aged 87, had an accomplished career in all the genres in which he worked. Henry Jaglom made over twenty films and managed to put his personal stamp on all of them. He once said that Federico Fellini’s 8½ changed his identity and that all he wanted to do was make films about his own life. He started by assisting Jack Nicholson on the editing of Easy Rider in 1969 and then made his own writing and directing debut in 1971. He had already appeared in films as an actor from 1968 – in Psych-Out with Nicholson – and went on to work in Drive, He Said, directed by Nicholson, and continued acting in his own and other directors’ films. He also wrote a number of plays, drawing on material that was personal to him.
Henry David Jaglom was born to a Jewish family in London, the son of the Ukrainian import-export businessman Simon Jaglom and his German wife Marie. They had fled Germany to avoid the Nazi regime and moved to the UK but left for America after Henry was born and settled in Manhattan. Their son was educated at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School and also at the University of Pennsylvania where he studied English. After graduation (in 1963) Jaglom trained at the Actors’ Studio under Lee Strasberg and began to write and act and direct plays and cabaret off-Broadway. He was then contracted to Columbia Pictures and was cast in various television series and films, including Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie. Interestingly, he appeared as himself in Orson Welles’ turbulent production of The Other Side of the Wind. This was a satire on Hollywood set on the last day in the life of a film director. It was begun in 1970 but not completed until 2018. However, Jaglom published a book called My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, taken from the taping of his meals with the great man whom Jaglom used in some of his own films.
He went on to make Hopper’s Tracks (1976), one of the first films about the consequences of the Vietnam War. The first feature Jaglom wrote and directed was A Safe Place with Tuesday Weld, Jack Nicholson and Orson Welles, the story about a fantasising girl who can never grow up. He wrote and directed Sitting Ducks, a successful comedy in 1980 about two thieves (Zack Norman and Michael Emil, Jaglom’s brother) stealing from a gambling syndicate. Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983) had Karen Black and Michael Emil in a meet cute situation in Manhattan. Always - But Not Forever (also a play), Someone to Love (Orson Welles’ final film role) and Venice/Venice are thought to be among Jaglom’s most personal films, dealing with his own life. Eating was about women with eating disorders, while Last Summer in the Hamptons was compared to Chekhov in its portrayal of a theatrical family. Vanessa Redgrave and her mother Rachel Kempson were both in Déjà Vu, about women meeting in Tel Aviv and becoming embroiled in a complicated family situation.
Jaglom continued making unusual and very personal work, acting, writing and directing. For example, his Festival in Cannes (2001) dealt with the relationships of those in the film industry and was shot entirely at Cannes. He won and was nominated for a number of international awards from Venice, Chicago, Deauville and the AFI Fest. He was married three times, to the actress Patrice Townsend, then the actress Victoria Foyt, with whom he had two children. Both marriages ended in divorce and his third to Tanna Frederick was annulled. In 1995 Henry Alex Rubin and Jeremy Workman published their book about the filmmaker called Who Is Henry Jaglom?
MICHAEL DARVELL