LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) — Director, actor, writer, producer, and film historian Peter Bogdanovich has died. He was 82.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, his daughter, Antonia Bogdanovich, said he died of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on Thursday.
A native of Kingston, New York, Bogdanovich graduated from the prestigious private Collegiate School in New York City and studied acting at the equally prestigious Stella Adler Studio of Acting.
After a stint programming films for the Museum of Modern Art in the late 1960s, Bogdanovich relocated to Los Angeles with the ambition to direct. After a chance meeting with noted B movie director Roger Corman, Bogdanovich began working on Corman’s 1968 crime thriller “Target” featuring Tim O’Kelly and Boris Karloff.
In 1971, Bogdanovich broke through to the mainstream when he directed The Last Picture Show, based on the Larry McMurtry novel of the same name. The film drew favorable comparisons for Bogdanovich to directors such as Orson Welles and went on to earn eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, and won two statues, for Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories.
During this period, Bogdanovich directed numerous other successful films, including What’s Up Doc (1972) starring Ryan O’Neal and Bette Midler, and the critically acclaimed Paper Moon (1973), a Depression-era comedy that also starred Ryan O’Neal and his daughter Tatum O’Neal, who won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her role in the film.
However, not all of Bogdanovich’s work from the period was well-received and he directed several notable flops, including At Long Last Love (1975), Nickelodeon (1976), and They All Laughed (1981) which resulted in Bogdanovich declaring bankruptcy after taking on the task of financing the distribution of the film.
Bogdanovich was romantically linked with several of his leading ladies, including Cybill Shepherd, who he met during the filming of The Last Picture Show and who prompted him to split with his wife and longtime artistic collaborator Polly Platt, and former model Dorothy Stratten, who he met during the production of They All Laughed, and who went on to be murdered by her husband after the production wrapped.
In addition to his work behind the camera, Bogdanovich was an actor as well, appearing in roles such as Dr. Elliot Kupferberg in the HBO drama The Sopranos, and a disc jockey in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill vol. 1 and 2.
Bogdanovich was also a noted film historian and critic, penning more than a dozen books on directors such as Orson Welles, John Ford, Howard Hawkes, and Fritz Lang.
In 1998, National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress added Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films”.
According to Variety, Bogdanovich is survived by his two children with Platt, Antonia and Sashy.
