Director

Born: February 22 1944;

Died: April 26 2017

JONATHAN Demme, who has died aged 73, was, at the height of his career, one of the most versatile, and the least predictable, directors in Hollywood; between 1980 and 1993 he turned out three terrific, but very different, comedies, Melvin (and Howard), Something Wild and Married to the Mob, one of the best concert movies ever made, Stop Making Sense, and the Oscar-winning dramas The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia.

There were less successful pictures – his career began with the low-budget exploitation specialist Roger Corman and (bar what some thought a late rally with Rachel Getting Married) rather petered out with ill-advised remakes of Charade and The Manchurian Candidate ¬ but at his best Demme was an original and stylish director; hip, off-beat, lyrical, generous-hearted and assured.

Visually, he developed an innovative approach to – of all things – the close-up, while only Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino were in his league when it came to appropriating popular music for the screen.

Robert Jonathan Demme was born on February 22 1944 at Baldwin, on the South Shore of Long Island, New York. His father, a public relations executive, took a job in Florida, and Demme grew up in Southwestern Miami. As a boy, he worked in a kennels and planned to become a vet, though he gave up that ambition after failing chemistry at the University of Florida. Instead, he became film critic of the university newspaper, and was soon submitting reviews to other local publications.

His favourable review of Zulu (1964) came to the attention of the film’s producer, Joseph Levine, who was staying at the hotel where Demme’s father handled the PR; on the strength of it he gave Jonathan a job in the publicity department of Embassy Pictures.

In 1969 Demme moved to London, working in publicity and on the fringes of the film business, including selecting and gaining the clearances for music. During this period he met Corman, who encouraged him to begin writing and directing. He co-wrote and produced Angels Hard As They Come and The Hot Box, standard exploitation fare about a biker gang and women in prison, but his second-unit work on the latter led Corman to give him the director’s job on another prison movie, Caged Heat (1974). He made two further films for New World Pictures, the cult road movie Crazy Mama (1975) and Fighting Mad (1976), with Peter Fonda as a farmer taking on corporate developers with a bow and arrow.

In 1977, Paramount hired him to direct the comedy Citizens’ Band, which gained some critical attention but, even after repackaging as Handle with Care, sank without trace. The Last Embrace (1979) was a formulaic thriller elevated by Demme’s assured direction and the presence of Roy Scheider and Christopher Walken.

Melvin (and Howard), written by Bo Goldman, who had scripted One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Rose, was the quirky tale of a happy-go-lucky loser who rescues a stranger in the Nevada desert; later revealed as the billionaire Howard Hughes (Jason Robards, superb), who may – or may not – have left him a fortune in his will. It gained positive reviews, with critics singling out Demme’s greatest strengths as a director, his genuine engagement and human sympathy, and ability to make the dross of Americana almost lyrical. Mary Steenburgen won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar as Melvin’s first wife.

It was not, however, a huge hit and, besides some television work for Saturday Night Live and an adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut story for American Playhouse, Demme did not make another picture until 1984’s Swing Shift. Some people think this might have been a good film, but in the event the star (and producer), Goldie Hawn, insisted on changes so extensive that Demme disowned the movie.

Bruised by the experience, Demme made a documentary-style film, shot over three nights, of the band Talking Heads in concert. It is generally reckoned one of the greatest rock concert films ever made; the band’s Dumbarton-born frontman, David Byrne, later collaborated with Demme on Married to the Mob (1988), for which he provided the score.

Something Wild (1987) was a screwball comedy in which the straight-laced Jeff Daniels is led astray by the kooky Melanie Griffith: it somehow contrived successfully to mix in elements of real menace and suspense. It may be Demme’s best picture, demonstrating his interest in people and ability to shift tone without losing control, but it is wayward and quirky. It gained a cult following, but little commercial success on release.

Married to the Mob, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Dean Stockwell, was a more conventional, and financially successful, comedy, which holds up well. Nothing in Demme’s career, however, had suggested the enormous commercial and critical response to his next picture, an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s thriller The Silence of the Lambs.

The film won Oscars in all the major categories (Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor and Actress) and was a huge hit. It was Demme’s most mainstream film, but some of its impact came from the director’s emphasis on the relationship between the FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and Anthony Hopkins’ cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal Lecter. Rather than tone down the latter’s incredibly hammy performance, Demme used extreme close-ups to increase the effect, injecting an element of humour into an essentially cliché-ridden story.

Philadelphia (1993), which won Tom Hanks an Oscar as Best Actor, was an equally conventional Hollywood treatment, though of a subject no mainstream studio picture had tackled full-on: the prejudice which surrounded people with Aids. Demme later said that he had aimed the film at those who held those views, not liberals like himself, and it was in those terms highly successful. In particular, the performances of Hanks, Jason Robards, as the cynical head of the firm, and Denzel Washington, as an initially homophobic lawyer, did much to change public attitudes.

Thereafter, Demme’s work became more conventional and, as a result, less interesting. Beloved (1998) was a very boring adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel, and the atrocious The Truth about Charlie demonstrated – to no one’s surprise – that Mark Wahlberg is no Cary Grant. Having wrecked the unimprovable Charade with this travesty, Demme repeated the offence by remaking The Manchurian Candidate (2004), which not even Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep could save.

Some, however, detected a return to form in 2008’s Rachel Getting Married, in which he adopted a documentary style, and which secured Anne Hathaway a Best Actress nomination. It owed much to Robert Altman’s film A Wedding.

Other work included documentaries on Jimmy Carter, on Demme’s cousin Bobby, who was an episcopal priest in Harlem, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and three films about the musician Neil Young. He made numerous music videos, working with New Order among others, and last year directed a film on Justin Timberlake. Demme, a stalwart of the arts scene in downtown Manhattan, also made forays into theatre and liberal political campaigns. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2015.

His first marriage, to Evelyn Purcell, ended in divorce. He married, secondly, Joanne Howard, who survives him with his three children.

ANDREW MCKIE