Obituary: Nicolas Roeg, film-maker

Died: November 23 2018

NICOLAS Roeg, who has died aged 90, was one of the most original, and possibly one of the most overlooked, film directors Britain ever produced. His films, which included Performance (1970), Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), Bad Timing (1980), Eureka (1983), Insignificance (1985) and The Witches (1990) were visually sumptuous meditations on death, meaning, and the frailty of the brief connections people make with one another.

While he was cited as an important influence by directors such as Steven Soderbergh, Wong Kar-Wai and Christopher Nolan, others, such as the critic David Thomson, accused him of visual pretension and narrative incoherence. Most of his work eventually found admirers, but it took time; few of his pictures were successful on their initial release.

Though he received an honorary Bafta for lifetime achievement in 2009 and a retrospective at the British Film Institute, awards and commercial success largely eluded him. Several of his films were hobbled by bad timing, including the one with that title: Performance was held back by its distributors for two years; Eureka, an analysis of the failure of money to bring happiness, came out at the height of the “greed is good” period of the 80s; one of the producers of The Man Who Fell To Earth hated it, before admitting to Roeg, seven years later, that he had been wrong; for much of Roeg’s later career he found it difficult to get any backing for his projects.

Yet it was a long and productive career. Roeg had risen through the ranks, from teaboy and clapper-loader to a stint as a camera operator and cinematographer before going on to direct his own pictures. He was the operator on The Trials of Oscar Wilde (Ken Hughes, 1960) and second unit director on David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), for whom he also filmed much of Doctor Zhivago (1970), though he was sacked during shooting, and uncredited in the final film.

He was lighting cameraman on The Caretaker (1963) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and the cinematographer for Roger Corman’s adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Terence Stamp maintained that Roeg had been entirely responsible for the sword-fighting scenes that introduced his character in John Schlesinger’s film of Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), shooting them without the director’s knowledge or permission.

Nicolas Jack Roeg was born on August 15 1928 in London and grew up in Marylebone. His father Jack worked in the diamond trade until the family’s fortunes were hit by a series of bad investments. As a child Nic was mesmerised by films, and nick-named “Mr Arty-Farty” by his sister, though he claimed that the only reason he ended up working in the industry was that Marylebone Studios was across the road from his family home.

He started as a teaboy in 1947, after national service, and got his first job as an assistant camera operator on George Cukor’s Bhowani Junction (1956); he later worked on Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959). The last film he made as cameraman rather than director was Richard Lester’s uncharacteristically bleak Petulia (1968), starring Julie Christie and George C Scott. It prefigured many of the elements that featured in his work as a director: tortured personal relationships, stylish visuals, non-linear narrative, idiosyncratic editing and rock music.

Performance, which starred Mick Jagger and James Fox, was co-directed with Donald Cammel in 1968. It dealt with a gangster who moves in with a rock star and was initially regarded by Warner Bros as “unreleasable” because of its graphic violence and sexual content. The script was much influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, and the visuals by Alain Resnais.

Roeg then made Walkabout, notorious for having a shooting script of only 14 pages, and featuring two children (played by Jenny Agutter, then 17, and Roeg’s own son Luc) left to fend for themselves in the Australian outback. The photography was much admired, but the film sank commercially.

Don’t Look Now, based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, was set in Venice and featured Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as a couple (perhaps literally) haunted by the death of their daughter. The recurring image of a child in a red coat and the explicit sex scenes – intercut with banal shots of the couple getting dressed to go out afterwards – gained critical praise and popular success. The film is now widely regarded as one of the best, and most influential, horror movies ever made.

The Man Who Fell to Earth, like Performance, featured a rock star in the leading role. David Bowie, at his most ethereally beautiful and at the height of his prodigious cocaine addiction, was wonderful as the alien who lapses into ennui and alcoholism after building a business empire on Earth, while the images – from New Mexico to the shots of bodies falling through air – were dazzling. But the studio hated it, and attempted to hack it about, while its moral ambiguity and nods to Auden and Bruegel did not then appeal to many science fiction fans.

His next film, Bad Timing, owed something to Ingmar Bergman, and dealt with a psychiatrist’s love affair in Vienna. It featured Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell (whom Roeg later married) in the lead roles. Bleak, pessimistic and sexually disturbing, it is now highly regarded but was described by one executive at the Rank Organisation (which took its logo off the picture) as “a sick film made by sick people for sick people”.

Eureka, with Gene Hackman as a prospector in the Yukon loosely based on Sir Harry Oakes, was visually stunning but virtually unseen, after the distributors lost faith in it. Insignificance, adapted from Terry Johnson’s play, again featured Theresa Russell, as Marilyn Monroe, in a story that also brought in Joe di Maggio, Senator Joseph McCartney and Albert Einstein.

In 1988, he made Castaway, based on Lucy Irvine’s memoir of her time on a desert island, and starring Amanda Donahoe and Oliver Reed (not at his best), and the first section of the portmanteau opera movie Aria (to Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera). Track 29 (1989), scripted by Dennis Potter and with Theresa Russell and Gary Oldman, is an interesting picture which few liked because the characters were so unpleasant.

The Witches, adapted from Roald Dahl’s book, was witty and faithful to the dark qualities of the source material, though Dahl was furious that Roeg changed the ending, but despite its brilliant effects (from the Jim Henson studios) and critical plaudits, its release was bungled and it did not do well at the box office.

Cold Heaven (1991) got bogged down in mystical mumbo-jumbo, while Two Deaths (1995), with Michael Gambon, sank without trace. His last cinema release was Puffball (2007), an Irish voodoo horror based on a novel by Fay Weldon, which starred Miranda Richardson, Kelly Reilly and Donald Sutherland.

Roeg continued to work into old age, despite the lack of enthusiasm for his work from distributors and producers, and also produced a number of shorts, rock videos and television films, notably Sweet Bird of Youth (1989) and Heart of Darkness (1994). He was appointed CBE in 1996.

He married three times: to Susan Stephen, with whom he had four children, to Theresa Russell, with whom he had two children, and from 2005 until his death, Harriet Harper.

ANDREW MCKIE