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“Midnight Express” and “Mississippi Burning” earned him Oscar nominations, and many of his films, in addition to “Fame,” were acclaimed.
By Neil Genzlinger
Alan Parker, nominated for an Oscar for Best Director for the 1978 film “Midnight Express” and ten years later for “Mississippi Burning”, died Friday in south London. He’s 76.
His death follows an unspecified illness, a spokeswoman for the British Film Institute said.
Mr. Parker has directed several other well-known films, which run in a variety of styles and genres. “Fame” (1980), a musical about a top performing arts student in New York. “Birdy” (1984) is based on a novel by William Wharton about a boy who had an erotic fascination with avian life. “Angel Heart” (1987), a sexy black boy who flirted with an X-rated score but ended up with an R. “Angela’s Ashes” (1999) founded on Frank McCourt’s popular autobiography.
Music is the basis of some of Parker’s best-known works. His first feature film, gangster satire “Bugsy Malone” in 1976, in which teenagers played gangsters and Paul Williams songs rated the action. Two years after “Fame,” he directed “Pink Floyd: The Wall”, a complete photo story about a British rock star written through Roger Waters by the band Pink Floyd and founded on the album of the same name. In 1991 came “The Commitments”, a joyous story about a band in Dublin. In 1996 she directed the film edition of the musical “Evita”, with Madonna as Eva Peron.
Madonna, she told the Mirror in 1996, is not the simplest user to paint with, but she figured out a way to make the most of her.
“My secret to letting my assistants complain to her to get her out of her formula so that during her time in front of the camera, she would have complained absolutely,” she says.
He earned him a Golden Globe.
Alan William Parker was born on 14 February 1944 in the Islington domain of London. He began his career as an advertising writer, then devoted himself to directing television commercials.
“The only way to give me a chance to say”Action! “And cut! “It was commercial,” he told the New York Times in 1980. “That’s how I learned the trade. I’ve done some ridiculous things, like recreate, frame by frame, “Brief encounter” for Birds Eye Dinner for One. “
This context, he said, gave him a certain contempt for film theory, which makes the director the main artistic force of a project.
“A movie is never my movie,” he said, “because I’m one of many people.”
In the early 1970s, with a lot of commercials to his credit, he began to devote himself to films, first as a screenwriter for a 1971 British film, “Melody”. In 1974, he directed a BBC television film titled “The Evacuees”, about young Jews evacuated from London by the bombing of World War II.
Soon, however, Mr. Parker was absolutely known with films on American themes.
“Midnight Express,” with a script through Oliver Stone, tells the story of an American student who is thrown into a Turkish criminal for drug trafficking. “Fame,” about academics at the High School of Performing Arts in New York, provoked complaints from Parker in his home country, where, he said, others asked him, “Why don’t you make a film about London, about the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art?”
“The exciting thing about the High School of Performing Arts,” he told The Times in 1980, “is that it has a social and ethnic combination that can’t be located anywhere in the world, especially in England.”
“Mississippi Burning” is a fictional remedy in the genuine case involving the murder of three civil rights activists in Mississippi in 1964. Vincent Canby, who reviewed it in the Times in 1988, called it “one of the toughest, hardest,most effective highs, and highest,fiction films still made about bigotry and racial violence, whether in this country or anywhere else in the world.
Some of Mr. Parker’s films have been controversial. “Midnight Express” has been accused of demonizing Turkey and its people. “Angel Heart” featured an exciting sex scene between Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet, who was then the most productive known for her role as Denise Huxtable in the family circle of the sitcom “The Cosby Show”. “Mississippi Burning,” starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, accused, among other things, of not having strong black characters even though it’s a civil rights-era story. “Angela’s Ashes” has been criticized for distorting Irish life.
“It would be great to make a film that isn’t controversial,” Parker told the Chicago Tribune just before the release of “The Commitments” benign,” though I’m sure someone will locate the controversy in “The Engagements.”
Parker won an award for the career of the Guild of Directors of Great Britain in 1998 and was knighted in 2002.
He is survived by his wife at the moment, Lisa Moran-Parker; a son from his marriage, Henry; 4 young men from his marriage to Annie Inglis, Lucy, Alexander, Jake and Nathan Parker; and seven grandchildren.
During a 2003 discussion organized through the British Film Institute along with the release of his most recent film, “The Life of David Gale,” about a death penalty opponent (Kevin Spacey) facing execution for murder, Parker talked about instinct and who play a role in the art of director.
“It turns out to me that a director’s job is to look for where the magic is in any scene,” he said, “and that’s not what you think.”
“Sometimes the pictures in your head are bigger than you end up,” he added. “Sometimes they’re not as smart as what’s in front of you.”
Alex Marshall contributed to the from London.
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