His family said in a statement that British director Alan Parker died on Friday, July 31, at age 76, after a long struggle with the disease. He was the author of the popular film Midnight Express, released in 1978.
During his nearly thirty-year career, he left behind an impressive string of critical and popular hits, including the musicals Fame (1980), Evita (1996) with Madonna or The Commitments (1991),
and Mississippi Burning (1988).
Also featured in the photos was the dual concept album The Wall, by Pink Floyd (1982) with Pink Floyd - The Wall, and Angel Heart (1987), a noir film tinged with the supernatural and voodoo with Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro. His film Birdy, about post-Vietnam war trauma, starring Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine, won the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes in 1985.
Controversial films
Coming from the ads, where he studied in the 1960s and 1970s, Alan Parker signed his first feature film in 1976: Bugsy Malone, which is a gangster musical piece entirely played by children.
Two years later, with Midnight Express, Alan Parker adapted (from Oliver Stone's screenplay) the biography of Billy Hayes, an American who was arrested in 1970 with several pounds of hashish at Istanbul airport and sentenced to thirty years in prison before the escape. The film, a grim portrait of the prison world and its injustices, won two Oscars in 1979, Best Adapted Screenplay by Oliver Stone and Best Original Screenplay by Giorgio Moroder. He also won six Golden Globe Awards and four BAFTA Awards.
Because it was considered biased, Midnight Express was banned in Turkey until 1993. Its description of the country caused a real shock. In his review published in 1978, Le Monde denounced the film "Intolerable and Dangerous":
Alan Parker, in his exasperation with the fate of the Yankees' 'Good Boy', shows, according to the worst xenophobic and racist clichés, all Turks as disgusting, corrupt, brutal, and wicked individuals. Regardless of the case of Billy Hayes, we cannot accept this portrait of her.
Billy Hayes himself had criticized in 1999 that "most events in the film" did not correspond to the facts he narrated in his book.
In 1988, Alan Parker was interested in the fate that black Americans suffered in the southern United States in the 1960s with Mississippi Burning. The film, which is based on an FBI investigation into the disappearance of three characters in the fight for civil rights, also sparked controversy. Some members of the movement criticized him for romanticizing events too much and for presenting the FBI in a very appropriate light.
Ten Oscars and 19 BAFTAs
Altogether, his works won nineteen BAFTA awards, ten Golden Globes, and ten Oscars. The Oscar ceremony on Twitter paid tribute to "chameleon", "an exceptional talent" that "would be sorely missed".
From "Fame" to "Midnight Express", the two-time Oscar nominee Alan Parker has been like a chameleon. We like his work, with ... https://t.co/gdJxlAeG1s
- TheAcademy (@ The Academy)
Former Cannes president Gilles Jacob praised the "lively, brilliant and prolific" director and "ironic spirit".
David Putnam, who produced several Alan Parker films, paid tribute to the man who was "his closest and oldest friend" and who "always impressed him with his talent". He added: "My life and that of many other people who loved and respected him will never be the same."
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