Jonathan Demme

1944–2017 · American film director, producer and screenwriter

Biography

Robert Jonathan Demme (February 22, 1944 – April 26, 2017) was an American director, producer and screenwriter whose career spanned more than thirty years across features, documentaries and television. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, and he is remembered for blending genre filmmaking with a warm, humanist view of his characters.

Demme began in the business under Roger Corman, the producer associated with exploitation cinema. He co-wrote and produced his first two films, Angels Hard as They Come (1971) and The Hot Box (1972), before directing a trio of pictures for Corman's New World Pictures, among them Caged Heat (1974), Crazy Mama (1975) and Fighting Mad (1976). His comedy Handle with Care (1977), made for Paramount, was well reviewed but got little promotion and did modest business. Melvin and Howard (1980) had a limited release yet earned a wave of critical praise and two Oscars from its three nominations, which opened doors in Hollywood.

The studio project Swing Shift (1984), starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, became a troubled production because of clashing visions between Demme and Hawn, and he eventually disowned the finished cut. Afterwards he turned to music documentary with Stop Making Sense (1984), the Talking Heads concert film that won a National Society of Film Critics award. It was followed by Something Wild (1986), a romantic comedy with an unpredictable tone, and Married to the Mob (1988), a comedy set among mobsters. In the late 1980s he co-founded the production company Clinica Estetico with Edward Saxon and Peter Saraf.

His breakthrough came with The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which won Best Picture and places it among the few films to take the top awards in all the major categories. Philadelphia (1993), inspired by the illness of a friend, addressed AIDS in mainstream Hollywood with a humane approach and earned Tom Hanks his first Best Actor Oscar. Demme also co-directed, with his nephew Ted, the video for Bruce Springsteen's Oscar-winning "Streets of Philadelphia". In the following years he adapted Toni Morrison's Beloved (1998) and made remakes of two 1960s films, The Truth About Charlie (2002) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004).

He kept moving between fiction and documentary, with works such as Man from Plains (2007), about former president Jimmy Carter, and Rachel Getting Married (2008), an independent drama that returned him to a more personal cinema and earned Anne Hathaway an Oscar nomination. His final years included a stage production, Family Week (2010), a concert film of Justin Timberlake (2016), and a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame project that was completed after his death. He died in 2017 of esophageal cancer. His style, marked by direct-to-camera close-ups and a loyal circle of recurring performers, influenced filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson, who has named him a major inspiration.