MARK PEPLOE
(24 February 1943 - 18 June 2025)
The British screenwriter and director Mark Peploe, who has died at the age of 82, was a celebrated documentarist before becoming a feature scriptwriter, working with some of the best European film directors. He also worked with his sister, Clare Peploe, who was also a director. He shared an Academy Award with Bernardo Bertolucci for The Last Emperor (1987) as well as winning other awards for the film. He either wrote or directed ten features, mostly first-rate examples of great cinema.
Mark Peploe was born in Nairobi, Kenya, to Willy Peploe, an art dealer, and his wife Clotilde, a celebrated painter. His paternal grandfather was the Scottish painter Samuel John Peploe, while his maternal great-great-grandfather was the German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand. With such an engaging artistic background it is no wonder that their offspring should be inclined towards the artistic. Mark and Clare were both encouraged by their mother to have careers in filmmaking. Mark attended Downside School in Somerset and then studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, after which he took a job as researcher and worked on a number of films about artists for the BBC. However, without control of his material while working for a large organisation, the documentary idea soon palled and he began looking for work on feature films.
Peploe wrote the screenplay for Jacques Demy’s The Pied Piper with Andrew Birkin in 1972. A musical fantasy with the folk singer Donovan in the title role, it was a nice idea but did not receive a good reception. David Puttnam was the co-producer. Peploe’s next project, Wanted: Babysitter (1975) was an Italian-French-West German thriller about the kidnapping of a babysitter by a film star and a stuntman. Maria Schneider, Sydne Rome and Robert Vaughn starred. It proved to be unpopular and was director Rene Clement’s last film before he retired. In the same year Peploe co-wrote The Passenger with its director Michelangelo Antonioni (and Peter Wollen) in which Jack Nicholson takes on the identity of a dead man, a documentarian, not realising he was also an arms dealer. Maria Schneider co-starred as his companion. Due to various complications, the film took three years for a cinema release and Nicholson then took over ownership of the print and later had it restored for a future re-release, when it achieved the status of a near classic.
Peploe next worked with his sister Clare on her High Season, a romantic comedy set on Rhodes with Jacqueline Bisset, James Fox, Kenneth Branagh and Lesley Manville. Clare Peploe was married to Bertolucci and Mark then worked with the Italian director on three films. The Last Emperor (1987) was about Aisin-Gioro Puyl, the last emperor of China and it showed Puyl becoming emperor as an infant up to his imprisonment and political rehabilitation. John Lone played the adult Puyl with Peter O’Toole as the Scots diplomat who advised the young emperor. The film was an outstanding success, winning nine Academy Awards, three Baftas, four Golden Globes, nine David di Donatellos and a Grammy for Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score.
Peploe then wrote The Sheltering Sky (1990) with Bertolucci, an adaptation of the novel by Paul Bowles about a couple’s journey to North Africa to save their marriage but who instead fall into trouble. Debra Winger and John Malkovich starred. Sadly, the film lacked commercial appeal although it did gain a Bafta for Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography. The third of Peploe’s films with Bertolucci was Little Buddha, about Tibetan monks looking for a boy who could be the rebirth of the great Buddhist teacher Lama Dorje. An American child living in Seattle seemed to fit the bill, although the boy’s parents were not convinced. Keanu Reeves co-starred as Siddhartha, a prince in Nepal who goes on a journey to find the answer to universal suffering. The film also featured Chris Isaak and Bridget Fonda as the boy’s parents. Its reception was not as good as that of The Last Emperor, perhaps because it lacked the ring of truth for a Bertolucci film.
The other two films written by Mark Peploe were Afraid of the Dark (1991) and Victory (1996), both directed by Peploe himself. The first was a horror film with James Fox, Fanny Ardant and Paul McGann about a young boy who spies on people. It had a mixed reception. Victory was based on the Joseph Conrad novel about a man living on an island, hoping to have a relationship with a prostitute. He does and they become lovers. Subplots of murder and looking for treasure heighten the drama. Willem Dafoe, Jean Yanne, Sam Neill, Rufus Sewell, Bill Paterson and Simon Callow are all involved in the melodramatic mix. It was Peploe’s last film but did not get a wide release.
MICHAEL DARVELL