(30 July 1939 - 6 January 2022)
The American actor, director and writer Peter Bogdanovich, who has died aged 82, originally trained as an actor at the Stella Adler School and began appearing in provincial theatre and on television in the 1950s. His first (uncredited) film role was in Roger Corman's The Wild Angels in 1966, for which he also co-wrote (uncredited) the screenplay. After completing a TV documentary on director Howard Hawks, he co-wrote with Samuel Fuller and directed his first film, Targets, in 1968. It concerned a veteran film star (Boris Karloff) who encounters a terrorist while attending a drive-in cinema. It was a splendid first film and it foretold Bogdanovich's all-consuming interest in Hollywood and the movie business.
Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, to a Serbian Orthodox Christian immigrant father and an Austrian Jewish mother. He had been an avid film fan from childhood and kept records of all the films he saw with notes and reviews. He secured a job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he programmed their film shows, often concentrating on the great American directors such as Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Allan Dwan, Raoul Walsh and John Ford, the last being the subject of his full-length film documentary in 1971. He also wrote widely on films for Esquire magazine, thus carving out a multifaceted career as an archivist, journalist and screenwriter as well as carrying on working as an actor and becoming a director.
His first major feature film as a writer-director was The Last Picture Show in 1971, a nostalgic reminder harking back to the heyday of the cinema in the 1930s and 1940s. The film, based on the Larry McMurtry novel, is set in 1951 when the last cinema in Anarene, a remote town in Texas, is shutting up for good. The film covered several stories about both the young and the older townsfolk and the rather bleak lives they live. It had a great cast including Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Randy Quaid, Ellen Burstyn and John Hillerman. What gave the film its class was the brilliant black-and-white cinematography of Robert Surtees.
His next film recalled the era of the screwball comedy under Howard Hawks. What's Up, Doc? had elements of a French farce as it dealt with four guests who arrive at a hotel sporting identical cases which all somehow get mixed up, causing total confusion. The casting of Ryan O'Neal, Barbra Streisand, Madeline Kahn and Kenneth Mars could not have been bettered and the film was a surefire hit. Then it was back to black-and-white for Paper Moon with cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs. Alvin Sargent adapted Joe David Brown's novel about a fake bible salesman during the Depression travelling with his young daughter. Ryan O'Neal was excellent although his own daughter, Tatum O'Neal, eclipsed his performance in an astonishing acting feat as young Addie.
Bogdanovich went on to make many more films during the 1970s and 1980s on disparate themes including Daisy Miller, from a story by Henry James, At Long Last Love, a musical-comedy set to the songs of Cole Porter, Nickelodeon, about a film director who falls for his leading lady in stories told to Bogdanovich by Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh, the crime comedy Saint Jack, They All Laughed, a New York set romcom, and Mask, about a boy with a disfigured face. Texasville (1990) was a sequel to The Last Picture Show in moving the characters on from the first film, but as good as it was, it was not a box-office success. He seemed to have lost his touch, although he made two very good documentaries, Runnin' Down a Dream, about the band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and The Great Buster, a celebration of the work of the silent comedian Buster Keaton, Bogdanovich’s last film in 2018.
He had also directed some television films, including To Sir, With Love II, a sequel starring the late Sidney Poitier, The Mystery of Natalie Wood, Hustle, about the baseball player Pete Rose, and an episode of The Sopranos. He also acted in many TV shows as well as films such as The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles' uncompleted film which finally emerged at the Venice Film Festival in 2018. He was prolific in other ways too, in his many fine documentaries on cinema heroes and other themes, and he wrote over a dozen books on the movies. Peter Bogdanovich was married to the producer and costume designer Polly Platt from 1962 to 1972 and they have two children, Antonia and Sashy. He later married the actress and producer Louise Stratton but they divorced in 2001. He was the partner of the actress Cybill Shepherd in the 1970s.
MICHAEL DARVELL
