Rest in Peace, Jonathan Demme
What a loss:
http://variety.com/2017/film/news/jonathan-demme-dead-silence-of-the-lambs-1202399122/
Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme died Wednesday in New York of cancer complications, his publicist told Variety. He was 73 years old.
Demme is best known for directing The Silence of the Lambs, the 1991 horror-thriller that was a box office smash, a critical triumph, and introduced moviegoers to Anthony Hopkins Hannibal Lecter, a charismatic serial with a yen for Chianti, fava beans, and cannibalism. The story of a novice FBI analyst (Jodie Foster) on the trail of a murderer became only the third film in history to win Academy Awards in all the top five categories ( picture, actor, actress, director, and adapted screenplay), joining the ranks of It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.
Though he had his greatest success terrifying audiences, most of Demmes work was looser and quirkier. In particular, he showed a great humanism and an empathy for outsiders in the likes of Melvin and Howard, the story of a service station owner who claimed to have been a beneficiary of Howard Hughes, and Something Wild, a screwball comedy about a banker whose life is turned upside down by a kooky woman. He also scored with Married to the Mob and oversaw Stop Making Sense, a documentary about the Talking Heads that is considered to be a seminal concert film.
Following The Silence of the Lambs, Demme used his clout to make Philadelphia, one of the first major studio films to tackle the AIDS crisis and a movie that won Tom Hanks his first Oscar for playing a gay lawyer...