Peter Bogdanovich Wiki, Biography, Age, Net Worth, Contact & Informations

Peter Bogdanovich
Wiki, Biography, Age, Net Worth, Contact & Informations

Here you can learn about Peter Bogdanovich’s career and private life facts, read the latest news, find all the awards he has won and watch photos and videos.

PERSONAL DATA OF PETER BOGDANOVICH

Age: 81 years old

Born in: KINGSTON, New York (USA)
Born on: 07/30/1939

BIOGRAPHY OF PETER BOGDANOVICH

Film director and critic. His father, an eclectic Serbian painter-pianist, and his mother, descended from a wealthy family of Austrian Jews, leave Europe to escape Nazism when he is about to be born. His first direct contact with the show is as an off-Broadway actor, after studying with the legendary Stella Adler. At the same time he writes about cinema for the magazine ‘Esquire’ and edited the monographs of Welles, Hawks and Hitchcock for the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York. In fact, in the meantime he also graduated in Film History with a thesis on John Ford’s ‘Furore’ (on which in 1968 he will write a famous book, while in 1971 he will publish one on Lang’s American period and another on Allan Dwan) . Already in 1965 he began to deal directly with cinema after coming into contact with Roger Corman, master of horror but also a point of reference for many young authors. Thanks to him he gains various experiences as a screenwriter, operator, assistant director. He works for TV and participates with Jack Nicholson in the film “The Fire Serpent” (1967) then Corman encourages him to go to directing by financing in 1968 his first film, “Targets” which already contains the themes of his cinema: the relationship between screen and reality and the critical reworking of the cinema of the past and which also inaugurates his collaboration with Laszlo Kovacs, who will then almost always be his director of photography. In 1971 he made a documentary on John Ford “Directed by John Ford” which was presented at the Venice Film Festival that year (whose new version enriched by 13 minutes of unpublished material in 2006 will be screened, out of competition, at the 24th edition of ‘ Turin Film Festival ‘). Also in the same year he achieved international fame thanks to the film considered his masterpiece: “The last show”, an engaging reflection on the US cinema of the 1950s, in which the reproduction of the American province of those years serves to make people understand the origins of crisis of that way of making cinema. In the following film, however, “But does papa send you alone?” (1973), he plays with cinephile quotes by remaking the comedians of Keaton and the Marx brothers. In “Paper Moon” (1973), a Frank Capra-style film that wins the Oscar for his very young interpreter Tatum O’Neil, the 1930s are revisited, those of his masters and the great depression that is photographed in a way masterly by Laszlo Kovacs. The next two films, “Daisy Miller” (1974), from the novel by Henry James, and “Finally Came Love” (1975), a reimagining of the 1930s musical, both played by his partner Cybill Shepherd, are not liked. neither to critics nor to the public and so Bogdanovich returns to comedy with “Old America” (1976), in the original “Nickelodeon”, the name of the cinemas at the beginning of the twentieth century that owed their name to the five-cent dollar coin (nickel) , admission ticket price. And that also marks the moment when in the cinema stories begin to be told and no longer just freak phenomena are shown. He then directed Ben Gazzarra twice, in 1979 in “Saint Jack”, a gangster-movie produced by the company formed together with Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, and in 1982 in “E tutti risero”, also starring Audrey Hepburn, a sophisticated comedy that mimics the moralism of Hollywood cinema. The film, however, is frozen for a year by Fox because at the end of filming Dorothy Stratten, the twenty-year-old ex playmate who had started a relationship with him after separating from her husband-pygmalion-master, is killed by her husband who commits suicide soon after. Bogdanovich stays still for a long time then in 1984 he publishes a book in his memory “The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980” then tackles the difficult issue of handicap inspired by a true story, in “Behind the mask”, one of the her best films, which won Cher the award for best actress at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. In the following years he directed various works for TV, while his film “Texasville” (1990), which can be considered the sequel to “The Last Show” and was shot in Archer City itself, did not convince critics. The same happens for “That Thing Called Love” (1993), set in Nashville, which will also be the last film by River Phoenix, in which the director takes up the discourse on the American province. In 2001 he presented “The Cat’s Meow” in Locarno in which, starting from a theatrical text, he gives a version of the mysterious death of the producer Thomas Ince, which took place in November 1924 on the yacht of the famous publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. It was said that the billionaire killed Ince by chance and instead wanted to shoot Chaplin out of jealousy of his young lover, the actress Marion Davis, but the reconstruction, even in its perfection, remains cold despite the fact it is exciting. He also returns to star in the television series ‘The Sopranos’ as the supervisor of Dr. Melfi and also directs an episode. Identified with the role, he also voiced a psychologist in the animated series The Simpsons. In his book “Who’s in that film?” (Ed. Fandango, 2008) he talked about his experiences as an actor and director who got to know the icons of American cinema up close.