Film director known for Rocky and The Karate Kid

Born: December 21, 1935;

Died: June 16, 2017

JOHN G Avildsen, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 81, had no interest in boxing and was reluctant to even look at the script he had been sent for a film called Rocky, written by a bit-part actor who was insisting on playing the starring role himself.

However, after reading just a few pages he was won over by a scene in which the beat-up boxer comes home and starts talking to his pet turtles Cuff and Link. “I thought it was an excellent character study,” he said.

Rocky went on to win three Oscars, including Best Picture of 1976 and Best Director, pipping Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men. And the only film to gross more in 1977 was Star Wars. It also made a major star of its writer-cum-leading man Sylvester Stallone.

However, Avildsen never rose to the heights of fame as contemporaries such as George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, perhaps because of poor choices and perhaps because he fell out with so many people.

His follow-up to Rocky might well have been Saturday Night Fever (1977), but “creative differences” between him and producer Robert Stigwood led to his departure just before filming began – there is however a Rocky poster in John Travolta’s bedroom in the film.

Instead he directed Slow Dancing in the Big City (1978), about a ballet dancer with a debilitating illness. It flopped at the box office and Avildsen had to wait another six years for his next big hit – The Karate Kid (1984). It also featured an underdog redeemed through combat sport and Avildsen dubbed it The KaRocky Kid. He directed two Karate Kid sequels and returned to the Rocky series for Rocky V (1990).

He was born John Guilbert Avildsen, the son of a businessman, in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1935. He worked as an assistant director before becoming a director in his own right. He enjoyed critical and modest commercial success with Joe (1970), a low-budget drama which has been described as the anti-Easy Rider and starred Peter Boyle as a bigoted, hippie-hating factory worker.

Avildsen tended to specialise in dramas about losers and directed Jack Lemmon to the Best Actor Oscar as a factory owner who burns down his property for the insurance money in Save the Tiger (1973). He already had a solid body of work behind him when he made Rocky.

He had the chance to direct the sequel, but turned it down, opting for Slow Dancing in the Big City and The Formula (1980), which starred Oscar-winners Marlon Brando and George C Scott. It also flopped at the box office and secured multiple nominations at the Golden Raspberries for the worst films of the year.

Then came Neighbors (1981). It reunited John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the stars of The Blues Brothers (1980). Belushi played a dull suburbanite whose life is transformed by the arrival of Aykroyd next door, but Avildsen made no secret of the fact that Belushi had been forced on him by the studio. He said: “I thought he might be the kind of comic actor who would bring something special to serious acting, so I was wrong.”

Avildsen was married and divorced more than once and is survived by four children. A few years ago his son, Ash Avildsen, who founded the Sumerian record label, revealed that he saw nothing of his father after his parents separated when he was young. "He’s an incredibly talented director but I don’t really know him,” he said.

A new documentary John G Avildsen: King of the Underdogs had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in February.

BRIAN PENDREIGH