NICOLAS ROEG (1928 - 2018)
Roeg, who passed away on November 23rd in London of natural causes at the age of 90, began his career in the camera department in the British film industry. He worked his way up, starting at the age of nineteen, from clapper-loader to camera operator to becoming the second-unit cinematographer on David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" in 1962. Roeg impressed Lean enough to hire him to be the cinematographer on his follow-up feature, "Doctor Zhivago". This lead to him becoming an in-demand photographer, working with such noted directors as Roger Corman ("The Masque of the Red Death") François Truffaut ("Fahrenheit 451"), John Schlesinger ("Far from the Madding Crowd") and Richard Lester ("Petulia"). Around 1968, Roeg decided that after twenty-three years in the movie business to try his hand at directing.
His first film was "Performance", (which he co-directed with Donald Cammell) a crime-drama about a London gangster (James Fox) who goes in to hiding after murdering the wrong man in the countryside home of a former rock star (Mick Jagger in his film acting debut). While Roeg had completed shooting in 1968, the studio distributing the film, Warner Bros. did not release it until two years later due to their concern with what was considered explicit sexuality and graphic violence at the time. "Performance" was not a big hit but has since gone on to become a cult classic. Despite this brief setback, Roeg went on to create many idiosyncratic films including "Walkabout"(1971), "Don't Look Now" (1973), "The Man Who Fell to Earth" (1976), "Insignificance" (1985) and "The Witches" (1990). The last film he directed was "Puffball", a little-seen supernatural drama, in 2007. Roeg was married three times (with his second marriage to actress, Theresa Russell who he met on his 1980 film, "Bad Timing") and survived by six children.
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI (1941 - 2018)
The acclaimed Italian filmmaker, Bertolucci, who died on November 26th after a battle with cancer, began his professional career as a published, prize-winning author at the age of fifteen. Creativity ran in his family as Bertolucci's father, Attilio was a poet and film critic and his brother, Giuseppe was a playwright and theater director. After Bertolucci's father helped filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini get his first novel published, the director hired the young man as first assistant for his film, "Rome on Accattone" in 1961. He became hooked on creating cinema and instead of finishing college, Bertolucci directed his first feature in 1962, "The Grim Reaper (La commare secca)" which was based on a short story by Pasolini. But it was his follow-up 1964 film, "Before The Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione)", a romantic-political drama that brought the fledgling director international attention.
Bertolucci's major breakthrough came in 1972 with the still highly controversial, "Last Tango in Paris" that featured Hollywood star, Marlon Brando and French actress, Maria Schneider. One of the more distressing issues was over the filming of the scripted explicit rape scene involving butter with the then-nineteen year old actress and forty-eight year old, Brando. The problem was that nobody had told Schneider what was going to happen during the shooting of this sequence (in order to get a more realistic response per Bertolucci) and had later stated that she felt completely humiliated and violated.
Other notable films in Bertolucci's career include "The Conformist (Il conformista)" (1970), "1900" (1976), "The Sheltering Sky" (1990), "Stealing Beauty" (1996) and "The Last Emperor", the 1987 epic drama on the life of Puyi, the final Emperor of China which went on to be nominated and win nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Bertolucci. He had been married to screenwriter/director, Clare Peploe since 1979.
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