William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director who became a top filmmaker in his 30s with the gripping The French Connection and the horrifying The Exorcist but struggled in the following decades to match his early success, has died. He was 87. Friedkin, who won the best director Oscar for The French Connection, died Monday in Los Angeles, his wife, producer and former studio head Sherry Lansing, told the Hollywood Reporter. The movie, based on a true story, deals with the efforts of maverick New York City police detective James "Popeye" Doyle to track down Frenchman Fernando Rey, mastermind of a large drug pipeline funneling heroin into the United States. It contains one of the most thrilling chase scenes ever filmed.
The movie also won Academy Awards for best picture, screenplay, and film editing and led critics to hail Friedkin, then just 32, as a leading member of a new generation of filmmakers. He followed with an even bigger blockbuster, The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty's best-selling novel about a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil. It received 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Friedkin as director, and won two, for Blatty's script and for sound. With that second success, Friedkin would go on to direct movies and TV shows well into the 21st century. But he would never again come close to matching the success of those early works, the AP reports.
Other film credits included Sorcerer, To Live and Die in LA, Cruising, Rules of Engagement, and Killer Joe. Friedkin, whose parents fled pogroms against Ukrainian Jews in the early 20th century, grew up in Chicago and worked his way up to directing TV shows within a few years of taking a job in the mailroom of local TV station WGN in 1953, the New York Times reports. His final movie, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, will be released at this year's Venice film festival, the Guardian reports. The legal thriller stars Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Clarke. (More William Friedkin stories.)
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