Iconoclastic British director Nicolas Roeg has died at the age of 90, his family announced on Saturday. The director’s credits include some of cinema’s most cherished titles, including “Walkabout” (1971), “Don’t Look Now” (1973) and “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (1976). He is survived by his third wife, Harriet Harper, and his six children, Waldo, Nico, Sholto, Luc, Maximilian and Statten.
Roeg was born on August 15, 1928, in London. Among his early jobs was “making tea and operating the clapper board at Marylebone Studios, where he worked on a number of minor films”, theBBC said in its obituary. His early training was in cinematography, and he was a part of the camera unit on David Lean’s period film “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962). Roeg was to have shot Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago” (1965) before falling out with the filmmaker.
Roeg made his feature debut in 1970. He co-directed with Donald Cammell the Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger in “Performance.” The film traces the hallucinatory encounter between a gangster (James Fox) and a pop star (Jagger). The film was completed in 1968, but was delayed until 1970 because of its graphic scenes of sex and violence.
Jagger’s lack of acting experience made him perfect for the role, Roeg said in his 2013 autobiography “The World is Ever Changing.”
“In the Hollywood Bowl there were something like 60,000 people for Mick Jagger,” he observed. “How many straight actors have had 60,000 people turn up for a single performance? Mick gives a performance unlike anyone else. It’s an extraordinary piece of acting art.”
Roeg set his next movie, “Walkabout” (1971), in Australia. Based on James Vance Marshall’s novel of the same name, the acclaimed film follows a pair of siblings who get lost in the Australian Outback and meet an Aboriginal boy. David Gulpilil, who played the native boy, went on to become one of Australia’s best-known indigenous actors.
In 1976, Roeg directed shape-shifting pop star David Bowie in another of his best-known films. In the science-fiction film “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” adapted from a 1963 novel by Walter Tevis, Bowie plays an alien who flees his drought-ravaged planet and lands on Earth in search of water. Novelist Michael Crichton and actor Peter O’Toole were considered for the role that became one of Bowie’s best-known screen appearances.
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