The Memorial Wall

Peter Bogdanovich was an iconic film director known for “The Last Picture Show,” “Paper Moon,” and “Mask.” Died Thursday, January 6, 2021 at his home in Los Angeles of complications of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 82.

Within one decade, the ’70s, he was transformed from one of the most celebrated of filmmakers, notably for “The Last Picture Show,” into one of the most ostracized.

Peter Bogdanovich built a reputation as a film journalist in the 1960s with many of his stories published in Esquire magazine. He was hired by B-movie legend Roger Corman and worked with him on his films including “Wild Angels.” He directed and co-wrote the critically acclaimed Oscar-nominated “The Last Picture Show” in 1971. Based on a Larry McMurtry novel, the coming-of-age drama starred Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepard as young adults and the choices they have to make in a small Texas town. The movie established Bogdanovich as one of the maverick young directors of the 1970s along with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. They made their own artistic choices with their films instead of the studios. His next two films were critical and box office hits, “What’s Up Doc?” starring Barabara Streisand and Ryan O’Neal and “Paper Moon” with O’Neal and his daughter Tatum. Bogdanovich’s career then took a downturn, though he had success with the 1985 film “Mask.” He also acted, most notably playing a psychotherapist on “The Sopranos.”  

Notable Quote: “Movies used to be something powerful. …It’s been a bit ruined now. I don’t know if we can get it back — I think we can. But it’s lost its innocence. The interesting stuff has moved to TV, and movies have become more like, ‘What can I blow up next?’ There’s a terrible cancer at the heart of that.” – Los Angeles Times in 2015 

Peter Bogdanovich, who parlayed his ardor for Golden Age cinema into the direction of acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” only to have his professional reputation tarnished in one of Hollywood’s most conspicuous falls from grace, died early Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 82.

His daughter Antonia Bogdanovich confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.

Originally trained as a stage actor (he was also a producer, a screenwriter, a film historian, a programmer and a critic, as well as a theater and television director), Mr. Bogdanovich was long recognizable by his soulful basset-hound face, outsize horn-rimmed glasses and trademark neckerchief.

As a filmmaker, he was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances from actors, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past — bygone in American cinema, bygone in America itself.

Reviewing “The Last Picture Show” — only Mr. Bogdanovich’s second film and widely considered his foremost — on its release in 1971, Newsweek’s critic called it “a masterpiece,” adding, “It is the most impressive work by a young American director since ‘Citizen Kane.’”

Before the end of the ’70s, however, Mr. Bogdanovich had been transformed from one of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood into one of the most ostracized. His career would be marred for years to come by critical and box-office failures, personal bankruptcies, the raking of his romantic life through the press and, as it all unspooled, an orgy of film-industry schadenfreude.

“It isn’t true that Hollywood is a bitter place, divided by hatred, greed and jealousy,” the director Billy Wilder once observed. “All it takes to bring the community together is a flop by Peter Bogdanovich.”

What was more, Mr. Bogdanovich’s life and work would be affected by violent, almost unimaginable personal loss.

Yet in a business that rarely grants second acts, he enjoyed a professional renaissance, both behind the camera and in front of it, in the 21st century. To television viewers of the period, he was probably best known for his recurring role on the HBO drama “The Sopranos.” He portrayed Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, the psychiatrist who treats Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, played by Lorraine Bracco.

Mr. Bogdanovich’s film career had seemed almost foreordained, for he was nothing short of a cinematic prodigy. “I was born,” he liked to say. “And then I liked movies.”

As a writer and critic, a calling he pursued in the 1960s, he was the author of influential monographs on Hollywood directors before he was out of his 20s.

As a director, he blazed to fame in the early ’70s as the auteur of three critically acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show,” based on Larry McMurtry’s novel of small-town Texas life; “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a contemporary twist on 1930s screwball comedies, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal; and “Paper Moon” (1973), starring Mr. O’Neal and his daughter, Tatum, about a Depression-era confidence man.

Mr. Bogdanovich’s life, it turned out, was bracketed by loss. For as he would discover, he had been born to a family defined by absence.

The son of Borislav and Herma Robinson Bogdanovich, Peter Bogdanovich was born on July 30, 1939, in upstate Kingston, N.Y., and reared on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His parents were recent immigrants to the United States — his father a Serbian painter, his mother a member of a well-to-do Austrian Jewish family.

The Bogdanovich home, Mr. Bogdanovich recalled long afterward, was pervaded by melancholy. His father was silent and withdrawn. Throughout Peter’s boyhood, their rare moments of camaraderie came when the elder Mr. Bogdanovich took his son to silent films at the Museum of Modern Art.

When Peter was about 8, he learned the source of the family sorrow: He had had an older brother, who died as a baby after a pot of boiling soup was accidentally spilled on him.

By this time Peter was irretrievably in love with motion pictures — sound and silent alike. From the age of 12 to about 30 he kept a file of index cards, one per picture, evaluating every movie he saw. In the end, he had amassed some five thousand cards.

Pictures from the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system — by directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock, starring actors like John Wayne, Cary Grant and James Stewart — beckoned to him above all.

“I just wanted to be like those people on the screen,” Mr. Bogdanovich told The Los Angeles Times in 1972. “I wanted to look like Bill Holden, because I wanted to be a real American boy and do all those wonderful things. And with a name like Bogdanovich there wasn’t much of a chance.”

As a teenager, Peter studied with the famed acting teacher Stella Adler. Leaving the Collegiate School, a Manhattan prep school, “a failed algebra examination shy of a high school diploma,” as The New York Times wrote in 1971, he played small roles in summer stock, Off Broadway and on television.

At 20, he directed an Off Broadway revival of Clifford Odets’s drama “The Big Knife.” (The cast included a young Carroll O’Connor.) Around this time, he began writing on film for publications like Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. He helped program Golden Age pictures for the New Yorker Theater, a Manhattan revival house, and for MoMA.

For MoMA, Mr. Bogdanovich wrote his series of monographs on great directors, including Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock and Orson Welles. It was a mission undertaken, he cheerfully confessed, so that he could meet and interview his idols.

Those sessions, he said, were his de facto film-school education. (Mr. Bogdanovich would spend the rest of his career, interviewers often carped, dropping his teachers’ names. “Jack” flicked out conversationally denoted Mr. Ford. “Hitch” and “Orson” were self-explanatory.)

He would become most closely involved with Welles, recording scores of hours of oral history before Welles’s death in 1985. The seminal book that resulted, “This Is Orson Welles” (1992), edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and with Mr. Bogdanovich and Welles as co-authors, is “the closest we’ll ever come to a Welles autobiography,” The Orlando Sentinel said in 2002.

Though Mr. Bogdanovich repeatedly disavowed the connection, critics liked to point out affinities between Welles’s career and his own: Both men began as directorial wunderkinds. (“Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, was Welles’s first full-length feature.) Both were later expelled from the Eden of A-list directors. (In the 1970s, a down-and-out Welles lived for a time in Mr. Bogdanovich’s mansion in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles.)

Mr. Bogdanovich struck out for Hollywood in 1964, accompanied by his wife, Polly Platt, a production designer he had married two years before. He was hired as a second-unit director and rewriter by the producer Roger Corman, whose movies — among them “Attack of the Crab Monsters” (1957) and “Teenage Cave Man” (1958) — strove for maximal shock value at minimal expense.

For Mr. Corman, Mr. Bogdanovich directed his first feature, “Targets,” released in 1968. Inspired by the Charles Whitman Texas tower shootings of 1966, it was nominally a thriller about a troubled young man who embarks on a killing spree.

But it was really a paean to, and an elegy for, the Hollywood films that Mr. Bogdanovich cherished. An aging, elegant Boris Karloff plays an aging, elegant version of himself. Scenes of Tim O’Kelly, who played the young man, scaling heights from which to shoot random strangers — a gas storage tank, a drive-in theater screen — are vivid homages to James Cagney’s last stand, high up in a gas plant, in “White Heat,” Raoul Walsh’s celebrated 1949 film.

For its stylish direction and brisk screenplay, by Mr. Bogdanovich and Ms. Platt, “Targets” drew wide critical praise. His triumph led him to be hired to direct “The Last Picture Show” for Columbia Pictures.

That film, with screenplay by Mr. Bogdanovich and Mr. McMurtry, centers on life and love in a down-at-the-heels town in the early 1950s. Shot in stark black and white in Mr. McMurtry’s hometown, Archer City, Texas, the movie, designed by Ms. Platt, portrays a world of boarded-up storefronts and blowing dust.

The cast featured relative unknowns, among them Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms and Cybill Shepherd, a 19-year-old model whom Mr. Bogdanovich had discovered staring seductively at him from the cover of Glamour magazine while he waited in a supermarket checkout line.

It also included veterans like Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson, who at midcentury had been a member of Ford’s stock company.

“The Last Picture Show,” too, is a valentine to old Hollywood. At the town’s fading movie house, Vincente Minnelli’s 1950 comedy, “Father of the Bride,” is playing. When the theater is forced to close, the last picture shown there is Hawks’s “Red River” (1948), starring the indomitable John Wayne.

Nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, “The Last Picture Show” won two, for the performances of Ms. Leachman and Mr. Johnson.

The film catapulted Mr. Bogdanovich to the first rank of Hollywood directors. It also upended his personal life. He left Ms. Platt and their two young children for Ms. Shepherd, embarking on an eight-year relationship that furnished ceaseless grist for Hollywood gossip columns.

His professional success continued with “What’s Up, Doc?,” a reworking of Hawks’s 1938 comedy, “Bringing Up Baby,” and again with “Paper Moon.”

Set in dust-blown 1930s Kansas, “Paper Moon” brought an Oscar to 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for her performance as a scrappy girl who may or may not be the con man’s daughter. (Despite her divorce from Mr. Bogdanovich, Ms. Platt designed this film and “What’s Up, Doc?”)

But after the wild success of the early 1970s came a string of creative debacles. Two vehicles Mr. Bogdanovich conceived to star Ms. Shepherd incurred critical vitriol: “Daisy Miller,” his 1974 adaptation of Henry James’s 1870s novella, and the musical “At Long Last Love” (1975), also starring Burt Reynolds.

“Produced for $15 million, this ‘musical’ was Cole Porter sung by the tone deaf, danced by the afflicted,” The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1990. “Critics compared leading man Burt Reynolds to a wounded buffalo and Shepherd to an orphan trying to play Noël Coward. The picture, which lost $6 million, was Bogdanovich’s ‘Heaven’s Gate.’”

His next film, “Nickelodeon” (1976), an overt homage to early cinema starring Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Reynolds, was also critically derided. But there was far worse to come.

In the late 1970s, after his romance with Ms. Shepherd had ended, Mr. Bogdanovich met the Playboy model Dorothy Stratten at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. They fell in love, and Ms. Stratten, who was married, left her husband to move in with him.

Mr. Bogdanovich gave her a small role in his caper “They All Laughed,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara. But in August 1980, before it was released, her estranged husband, Paul Snider, shot her to death before taking his own life. (The murder of Ms. Stratten, 20 at her death, would be the subject of a 1983 feature film, “Star 80,” directed by Bob Fosse and starring Mariel Hemingway.)

Afterward, Mr. Bogdanovich was reported to have watched “They All Laughed” — which preserves Ms. Stratten’s last film performance — over and over, as if communing with a ghost.

Released in 1981, the film was a critical and box-office failure. Dissatisfied with its promotion, Mr. Bogdanovich bought the rights and tried to distribute it himself. It proved a disastrous decision, costing him some $5 million.

In 1985, with “$21.37 in the bank and $25.79 in his pocket,” according to court papers, he declared bankruptcy, a move that further marginalized him in Hollywood. In the years that followed, he became, by his own account, addicted to prescription drugs.

“I made an enormous number of mistakes,” Mr. Bogdanovich said in a 2004 interview. “You don’t do rational things when somebody blows up an atom bomb at your feet.”

One thing he did that he said he came to regret was to write a biography of Ms. Stratten, “The Killing of the Unicorn,” which was equal parts adoration and accusation. Published in 1984, it contended that Mr. Hefner, in commodifying her, had been partly responsible for her death.

Mr. Hefner retaliated with a bombshell of his own: He publicly accused Mr. Bogdanovich of having seduced Ms. Stratten’s younger half sister, Louise, shortly after the murder, when Louise was 13, below the age of consent.

Mr. Bogdanovich denied the accusation. But it was a matter of record that he paid for Louise’s education; arranged for her to have corrective surgery on her jaw — an act, his detractors said, that was intended to make her look more like her dead sister — and, in 1988, when Louise was 20, married her, causing a frenzy of tabloid opprobrium.

Louise Stratten, billed as L.B. Stratten, appeared in several films and TV movies directed by Mr. Bogdanovich. They divorced in 2001.

“She was like a contact with Dorothy, as far as I was concerned,” Mr. Bogdanovich, speaking of the marriage, told The New York Times the next year. “There was garbage talk that I made Louise have facial surgery — to look like Dorothy. ‘Vertigo’ stuff.”

Mr. Bogdanovich seemed to return to directorial form in 1985 with “Mask,” a well-received picture starring Cher as the mother of a boy with a facial deformity.

But he alienated the Hollywood establishment once more by filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the studio, Universal Pictures, and the producer, Martin Starger, for cutting two scenes and substituting music by Bob Seger for the Bruce Springsteen soundtrack that Mr. Bogdanovich favored. (The suit was later withdrawn.)

Several critical failures followed, including “Illegally Yours” (1988), a romantic comedy starring Rob Lowe; “Texasville” (1990), a sequel to “The Last Picture Show”; and “The Thing Called Love” (1993), a comedy-drama about country music.

In the late 1990s, after declaring bankruptcy again, the down-and-out Mr. Bogdanovich lived for a time in the guesthouse of the young director Quentin Tarantino.

From the mid-’90s through the first years of the 21st century, Mr. Bogdanovich resorted to directing for television. His credits include the TV movies “Prowler” (1995) and “Naked City: A Killer Christmas” (1998) and an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney.”

But the medium, he said, taught him economy and speed. He returned to the big screen in 2001 with “The Cat’s Meow,” his first feature in nearly a decade. Made for just $6 million, it was shot in only 24 days.

That film, too, is a paean to old Hollywood. It tells the story — based on a long-suppressed incident that for years ran through the industry in whispers — of a fatal shooting in 1924 aboard the yacht of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

“The Cat’s Meow” — starring Edward Herrmann as Hearst; Kirsten Dunst as his mistress, the silent-film star Marion Davies; and Eddie Izzard as her lover Charlie Chaplin — earned mostly favorable notices.

Mr. Bogdanovich’s luster was also restored with his publication of two acclaimed books: “Who the Devil Made It” (1997), a collection of his interviews with eminent directors, and “Who the Hell’s in It” (2004), about great actors and actresses.

Later features he directed include “She’s Funny That Way” (2014) and “The Great Buster,” a documentary about Buster Keaton, in 2018.

In addition to his daughter Antonia, he is survived by another daughter, Alexandra (both from his marriage to Ms. Platt); a sister, Anna Bogdanovich; and three grandchildren.

Among Mr. Bogdanovich’s other films as a director are “Saint Jack” (1979), starring Mr. Gazzara as an American who aims to open a bordello in Singapore; “Noises Off …” (1992), an adaptation of a play by Michael Frayn; and the documentary “Directed by John Ford” (1971).

In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bogdanovich offered a cleareyed appraisal of his career.

“I’m not bitter,” he said. “I asked for it. Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do. Pride goeth before the fall.”

But when it came to one of his detractors, at least, Mr. Bogdanovich appeared to have the last laugh. His later-life acting roles included two appearances, in 2005 and 2007, on the NBC series “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

In both episodes, Mr. Bogdanovich, always a wicked mimic, played to the hilt a sybaritic, smoking-jacket-clad, thinly veiled incarnation of Hugh Hefner.

Maia Coleman contributed reporting. Margalit Fox is a former senior writer on the obituaries desk at The Times. She was previously an editor at the Book Review. She has written the send-offs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including Betty Friedan, Maya Angelou and Seamus Heaney.

John Lewis Marman IV, proud husband, father, granddad, former College of the Desert Athletic Director and Board Trustee, coach, educator, mentor, community leader and fundraiser, has passed away at the age of 81.

John Marman was born and raised in Sidney Montana, where his family started the F.T. Reynolds Co. grocery store chain. Known in his hometown as "Butch", he played the clarinet in the band, and was an accomplished high school athlete. John attended the University of Nebraska where, as a 6-foot' 1" 190-pound sophomore he played half-back in what is arguably called the greatest game in Husker history-, the 25-21 upset of Oklahoma in 1959 that ended the longest unbeaten streak in NCAA history- 74 consecutive games.

In Nebraska, John met his beautiful wife Madonna and went on to earn a master's degree at the University of Arizona. John and Madonna then settled in San Bernardino where he taught and coached at Pacific High School. In 1969, the couple moved to Palm Desert, where John became the track and field coach at College of the Desert. Two years later, Coach also became the football team's defensive back coordinator and in 1976 he was named as the school's second-ever COD Athletic Director.

As Athletic Director, Coach Marman launched the COD women's sports program, managed the summer recreation, pool and swim lesson program, and coached at least 10 different men's and women's teams before eventually taking the head football coach position, from 1982, taking the 0-10 Roadrunners to their first 1st Southern California Bowl conference title in 1986 against Golden West College, ending the season ranked 12th in the nation.

Coach retired as Athletic Director in 2002, going out with a bang! That final year he surprised no one by both sinking an impossible putt in one attempt, and swishing a half-court basketball shot on his first try during a halftime fundraiser, raising $20,000 for the College of the Desert Foundation.

After retirement, Coach could not walk away. He decided he wanted to play tennis for COD, so he enrolled in a full academic load, and joined the team, winning 80% of his doubles matches, and achieving a state ranking. Tennis Coach Guy Fritz remembers that during the conference tournament, Coach, then in his 60s, beat two college kids in back-to-back sets in 100-degree heat.

In 2006, Coach Marman was elected to the College of the Desert Board of Trustees, continuing his dedication to community service and education.

Coach led numerous community organizations and committees over the years, including: President, College of the Desert Faculty Senate; Board Chair and President COD Alumni Association; President, Palms to Pines Rotary Club; Recipient International Citation President Rotary Foundation; Board of Directors and President's Lifetime Circle member College of the Desert Foundation; Board of Directors Desert Special Olympics; Chair, College of the Desert Board of Trustees; Chair, Palm Desert Sister City Foundation; Chair, Riverside County Fair Board; Member, National Date Festival Board; Chair, Palm Desert United Way Fund Drive; Founder, Palm Desert Dance Festival; Founder, College of the Desert Shoot-Out Fundraiser; Vice Chair, Sister Cities Foundation; Co-Chair, Art/Cultural Education Committee; Board of Directors, Palm Desert Historical Society; Co-Chair with wife Madonna, Mini-Muster Fire Safety Education Program; Grand Marshall, Palm Desert Golf Cart Parade; Co-Chair, College of the Desert East Valley Alumni Committee; Board of Directors, Palm Desert Jaycees.

Coach was also instrumental in bringing national attention to College of the Desert by inviting events such as the "NFL's Fastest Man Competition", "Star Games" and the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers training camps to the campus for 12 years during the 1980s'90s. He even slipped keys to the gym to Shaquille O'Neal so he could practice alone in the middle of the night while he was in town.

Coach was particularly proud to Chair the Palm Desert Parks and Recreation Commission during construction of the Civic Center Park, Recreation Center and Sports Complex. During this time, he championed a pedestrian bridge across the east side drainage culvert so students from nearby schools and neighborhoods were not forced to walk for miles on busy streets to reach the park. The City of Palm Desert recently named the bridge in his honor.

Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdsuE5sT4sA

Coach Marman believed in the value of a College of the Desert education. All three of his children attended the College before going on to earn degrees at four-year universities in California. Coach's wife Madonna, who put nursing school on the back burner when they married so she could work to put him through graduate school, completed her R.N. degree at College of the Desert. The office of the College's Dean of Nursing is named in her honor, paid for with Coach's Board of Trustees salary.

John and Madonna loved traveling, playing tennis and hiking. They took hours of dance classes together, tore up the dance floor at Pappy and Harriet's, and tangoed their way through Brazil and Argentina. John was famous for his chili, his love for Willie Nelson and Tom Brady, and his grand dog Stewy!

John is preceded in death by Madonna Marman, his wife of 57 years. He is survived by their three children; daughters Sue (Suzi) Hanks (John); Danielle Scardino (John); son John Marman; and his pride and joy, 9-year-old grandson John Knox Marman, who by all indications has inherited his granddad's athletic prowess, and will be a basketball and football super stud!

Coach is also survived by his sister Anne Armstrong, as well as numerous cousins, nieces and nephews. He was also preceded in death by his parents, John and Vesta Marman, brothers Theodore and Kent, and sister Victoria.

While Coach was known for his INTENSITY on and off the field, he is also remembered for his mischievous sense of humor and lasting impact as a mentor, leader and father figure to his players, and his rule of no earrings or Mohawks on the field. He is remembered by many for his motivational mantra…" You Got to Want It!", and the dreaded punishment to run laps with the phrase, "Get on your horse!"

The Marman kids would like to thank Coach's many friends who supported him through his recent health challenges. We are especially thankful to his caregivers, Pat, Richard and Joey Hounsell at Britannia Lodge in Palm Desert. We are forever grateful for your love, compassionate care and incredible patience for the old G.O.A.T.

Stewart was born April 25, 1935 in Chicago, Illinois, and after a life well lived, passed away December 29, 2021 in Bend, at the age of 86.

Stewart was raised in Southern California by his parents, Louis and Fanny Weitzman. This is where his lifelong love of education, hard work, and cars started. In 1953 he was accepted to Stanford University and graduated with a degree in political science in 1957. At Stanford, he was a member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. After college, he served in the Marine Corps for two years, being honorably discharged as a First Lieutenant (later promoted to Captain in the reserves).

He met Verle Pilling through mutual friends in San Francisco in 1959 and their 62-year romance began at that time. They were married on January 23, 1960 in Palo Alto, California. They later moved to Portland, where they raised their two sons, Marcus and Todd.

Stewart worked in several sales-related jobs in the early 1960s, primarily in the pharmaceutical industry, before starting to pursue his MBA at Portland State in 1967. While in the MBA program, his entrepreneurial spirit was born as he started his first company, Pacemaker Corporation, a manufacturer of preventive dental products including fluoride gels. Pacemaker grew rapidly, and after developing several products that earned U.S. patents, the company was sold in 1978.

After consulting and working for several startups, he founded Weitech in Sisters, in 1989. Weitech was a manufacturer of electronic pest control products. At this time, he and Verle moved full-time to Black Butte Ranch. Stewart served as the chairman of the BBR homeowners’ board and as the president of the Sisters Area Chamber of Commerce. Weitech experienced rapid growth, and his son Todd soon joined the company. Weitech was sold in 2002 and Stewart retired.

Stewart and Verle enjoyed soaking up the sunshine in Indian Wells, California, during the winters. Stewart also enjoyed reading, classical music, travel, politics, car magazines, golfing, tennis, playing Shanghai, and was always scanning the classifieds for a new business opportunity. He was a decisive leader, a very generous man, and those who knew him appreciated his witty sense of humor. After 24 years living at Black Butte Ranch, he and Verle moved to Touchmark in Bend, where they have happily lived for the past nine years.

Stewart had struggled with Parkinson’s Disease for the past several years, but ultimately succumbed to colon cancer. Preceded in death by his parents Louis Weitzman and Fanny Weitzman, and his brother Morrel Weitzman. Survived by his wife of 61 years, Verle; brother Ronald (Morley) of Carmel, California; son Marcus (Chelley) of Mesa, Arizona; son Todd (Diane) of Sisters; and five grandchildren, Joshua, Christopher, Sarah (Matt), Abigail (Jared), and Becky (James).

Professionally known as Ian Holm, the versatile British character actor who earned an Oscar nomination for his turn as the athletics trainer in 'Chariots of Fire' and portrayed the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in four movies, has died. He was 88.

Holm died “peacefully in hospital” of an illness that was related to Parkinson’s disease, his agent said in a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.

Holm gained many sci-fi admirers for his performances as Ash, the decapitated android who keeps on going, in Ridley’s Scott’s Alien (1979) and as the office manager Mr. Kurtzmann in another classic, Terry Gilliam’s fantastical Brazil (1985).

Holm was at his subtle best as Gena Rowlands’ emotionally unavailable husband in Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988) and as an inscrutable big-city lawyer in the tragedy-laced The Sweet Hereafter (1997), written and directed by Atom Egoyan.

At 5-foot-6, Holm was always an excellent candidate to play a certain pint-sized French emperor, and he did so three times, in the 1974 nine-part miniseries Napoleon and Love, in Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) and in The Emperor’s New Clothes (2001).

And in one of his rare performances as a leading man, he was excellent as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in the 1978 BBC miniseries The Lost Boys.

A member of the Royal Shakespeare Company starting in the 1950s, Holm collected Tony and Olivier awards before a case of stage fright that blindsided him during previews for The Iceman Cometh left him queasy about working in front of a live audience for more than a decade.

Holm cemented his place in British cinema history when he played the eccentric track coach Sam Mussabini in the historical sporting drama Chariots of Fire (1981). The film, one of England’s most beloved, took the Oscar for best picture, and Holm was nominated for best supporting actor (he lost out to countryman John Gielgud of Arthur).

Holm later portrayed Bilbo, all for Peter Jackson, in The Lord of the Rings films The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Return of the King (2003) and in The Hobbit installments An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Battle of the Five Armies (2014).

The chameleon-like actor also played King John in Robin and Marian (1976), the father of the scientist in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), a nasty restaurateur in Big Night (1996), a New York City cop in Sidney Lumet’s Night Falls on Manhattan (1996), a holy man in The Fifth Element (1997) and Zach Braff’s psychiatrist father in Garden State (2004).

“I’m never the same twice,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2000, “and I’m not a movie-star type, so people don’t demand that I’m always the same.”

“I had such a good time and a fruitful one with Ian, and my only regret was not to have worked with him once again,” Scott said in a statement. “Ian talked to me during production quite a lot, which I found to be very helpful. A great talent and a great man — we’ll miss him.”

Ian Holm Cuthbert was born on Sept. 12, 1931, in Goodmayes, England. His Scottish parents worked in a psychiatric hospital; his mother was a nurse and his father a psychiatrist and early innovator in the technique of electroshock therapy.

In a 2004 interview with The Independent, Holm said he spent a great deal of time around the asylum as a youngster.

“I wasn’t allowed near any of the dangerous patients,” he noted, “but I do remember one who was called Mr. Anderson. He was always immaculately dressed and, most days, he would fill a wheelbarrow with soil and then spend the rest of the day picking every grain of soil out of the wheelbarrow and putting it on the ground. I rather liked that.

“My childhood there was a pretty idyllic existence. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was happy, but it passed without too much trauma.”

Holm studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, then spent more than a decade at the Royal Shakespeare Company starting in 1954. In a 1959 production of Coriolanus, Laurence Olivier cut Holm’s finger during a sword fight, and he wound up with a scar that he was quite proud of.

He made several appearances on British television in the early ’60s, including a stint as King Richard III in the BBC miniseries The Wars of the Roses.

In London in 1965, Holm starred as Lenny, one of the sons of a retired butcher, in the first staging of Harold Pinter’s eerie The Homecoming. He accompanied the play to Broadway two years later and won his Tony award, then reprised the role for the 1973 film adaptation. (All three versions were directed by Peter Hall.)

“He puts on my shoe and it fits!” Pinter once said of Holm. “It’s really gratifying.”

Things did not go as smoothly for Holm in 1976 when stage fright struck during work on Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.

“I got into my first preview, which I just managed to get through,” he recalled in 1998. “Then in the second preview, on the following night, I just walked off the stage and into the dressing room and said, ‘I’m not going back. I cannot go back.’ And they had to put the understudy on. My doctor said, ‘The Iceman goeth.’

“Something just snapped. Once the concentration goes, the brain literally closes down. It’s like a series of doors slamming shut in a jail. Actors dry up all the time. Well, I wasn’t just drying; I was stopping. My fellow actors were looking at me in amazement.”

Holm starred in Pinter’s Moonlight in 1993, then completed his stage comeback four years later when he disrobed completely in Richard Eyre’s acclaimed RSC production of King Lear and won an Olivier award.

Holm’s big-screen résumé also included The Fixer (1968), Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Mary Queen of Scots (1971), Juggernaut (1974), Greystoke — The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), Dreamchild (1985), Henry V (1989), Hamlet (1990), Naked Lunch (1991), The Madness of King George (1994), A Life Less Ordinary (1997), Joe Gould’s Secret (2000), The Aviator (2004) and Strangers With Candy (2005), and he voiced the grumpy chef Skinner in Ratatouille (2007).

For all this, Holm was named a Commander of the British Empire in 1989 and knighted nine years later. He published his memoir, Acting My Life, in 2004.

Survivors include his wife, Sophie. He was married four times (his third wife was Downton Abbey actress Penelope Wilton), was in another yearslong relationship with a photographer, and had five children.

Aaron Latham, the journalist, screenwriter and husband of CBS News veteran Lesley Stahl who penned the articles that served as the basis for the John Travolta films Urban Cowboy and Perfect, has died. He was 78.

Latham died Saturday at Bryn Mawr Hospital in Pennsylvania after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, his wife told The Hollywood Reporter. His health declined after he was diagnosed with COVID-19 in 2020, she added.

A native of Texas who wed Stahl in 1977, Latham worked for The Washington Post, Esquire, The New York Times and Rolling Stone, among other publications, during his career.

Urban Cowboy (1980) came from Latham’s Esquire piece that revolved around a romance between a mechanical-bull rider and a woman at the Houston-area nightclub Gilley’s. The real-life pair became Travolta’s Bud and Debra Winger’s Sissy in the box office hit.

Latham’s stories for Rolling Stone about young, single people and health clubs was turned into Perfect (1985), starring Travolta as a reporter and Jamie Lee Curtis as a workout instructor.

For both movies, he worked on the screenplays with director James Bridges.

Latham also co-wrote with director David S. Ward The Program (1993), the drama about college football that starred James Caan, and he co-wrote the book for the 2003 Broadway musical version of Urban Cowboy.

Aaron Latham was born on Oct. 3, 1943, in Spur, Texas, near Lubbock. His father was a high school football coach, and his mother taught grammar school.

Every time his dad had a winning season, “we moved to a bigger place,” he told Texas Monthly in 2000. “I lived in Spur, Munday, De Leon, Abilene. I was a football player until I got hurt during my freshman year. At one practice I ended up at the bottom of a pile, and I had to have my left kidney removed. Off the field, though, I always loved English.”

At Amherst, he edited the college newspaper before graduating in 1966, then earned his Ph.D. at Princeton.

In August 1973, Latham was reporting on Watergate when he contacted Stahl, then looking into the cover-up for CBS. “‘How dare you call me at home?'” he recalled her saying in a 1977 profile of the couple for People magazine. “‘If you want to talk, call me tomorrow at the office,’ she barked, and then slammed down the phone.”

They agreed to meet the next day, but in the meantime he decided to “turn on the TV to see what this person looks like.” He did and said he was “terrified. I thought, ‘She’s so beautiful.’ My heart stopped, my mouth dried up and I said, ‘What have I gotten myself into?'”

Latham’s first novel, Orchids for Mother, a roman à clef about the CIA and his early relationship with Stahl, was published in 1977. They married in February of that year.

His other books included Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood; Frozen Leopard: Hunting My Dark Heart in Africa; The Ballad of Gussie & Clyde: A True Story of True Love; Code of the West; and The Cowboy With the Tiffany Gun.

Stahl said that amid the bidding for the movie rights to Urban Cowboy, Latham had written into his contract that he handle the screenplay as well.

In a September 2018 interview with Brain and Life, she said Latham received his Parkinson’s diagnosis after puzzling symptoms like a slow gait led the couple to seek medical care.(Stahl told THR he had the disease for some 15 years.)

Though he faced a steep battle with the degenerative disorder, he continued to write and tackle new creative endeavors like directing plays.

He found relief and a new physical challenge through Rock Steady, a boxing program designed for people with Parkinson’s (Stahl did a segment on it for 60 Minutes).

Though Latham also found success with a surgical procedure called deep brain stimulation that helped reduce tremors and stiffness, his condition worsened after getting diagnosed with COVID-19.

“We got [COVID] together right at the very beginning,” Stahl, 80, told THR last week. “It really disrupted the course of his disease. Parkinson’s is a progressively degenerate disorder, and he was going along in a very slow, incremental, downward trend, but not bad. But when he got COVID, he just went off the side of the cliff.”

Survivors include their daughter, Taylor; son-in-law Andrew; and grandchildren Jordan and Chloe.

The couple relished their roles as parents and grandparents, with Stahl telling Guideposts: “Aaron, who was raised a Methodist, always says there’s a plan to the universe, there’s a higher order. Grandchildren come along and they send you in a direction you never dreamed you were going. You discover a new purpose, a new calling.”