(6 January 1968 - 29 April 2019)
The American film writer, producer and director John Singleton, who has died at the age of 51 following a stroke, was the youngest director to be nominated for an Academy Award. At 24 years old he was also the first African- American to be nominated in that category. The film was Boyz n the Hood (1991) and Singleton was also nominated for best screenplay written directly for the screen. The film detailed the lives of three street guys (Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr and Morris Chestnut) growing up in South Central Los Angeles surrounded by problems of drug dealing and gangsterhood. In his time Singleton wrote three other films, Poetic Justice with Janet Jackson, Higher Learning with Laurence Fishburne, and Baby Boy with Tyrese Gibson, all of which he also directed. Among the other films he directed were Rosewood with Jon Voight, 2 Fast, 2 Furious with Gibson and Paul Walker, Four Brothers with Mark Wahlberg, and Abduction with Taylor Lautner. He also produced all these films as well as a remake of Shaft with Samuel L. Jackson, Hustle and Flow with Terrence Howard, Black State Moan with Jackson again and Justin Timberlake, and Illegal Tender with Rick Gonzalez. He also contributed to television series including Empire, American Crime Story, Rebel, Billions and Snowfall, as well as several TV documentaries. He appeared as an actor in Beverly Hills Cop III, Baadasssss! and others, and played himself in The Game TV series. John Singleton was married briefly to Ghanaian filmmaker Akosua Busia and they have one daughter, Hadar. With his former wife, Tosha Lewis, he has two children, Tosha and Maasai, and he also fathered a daughter, Cleopatra. Arguably the most important black filmmaker since Spike Lee, Singleton claimed his favourite directors to be De Sica, Truffaut, Spielberg, Kubrick, Scorsese, Kurosawa, Cassavetes and Coppola. He was a great admirer of Western films such as Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950), a movie that particularly influenced many of Singleton’s own film set-ups.
MICHAEL DARVELL
