Peter Bogdanovich death: The Last Picture Show director dies aged 82

Oscar-nominated director died of natural causes, his daughter said

Bogdanovich in 2019 (Getty Images)

Director Peter Bogdanovich has died at the age of 82.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker, who was best known for The Last Picture Show and What’s Up, Doc?, died early on Thursday (6 January) at his home in Los Angeles, his daughter told The Hollywood Reporter.

Born in New York in 1939, Bogdanovich originally worked as a film journalist before beginning directing his own movies.

With a career spanning six decades, Bogdanovich was considered one of the “New Hollywood” directors, a name given to a group of filmmakers who pushed for editorial control on their projects at a time when major decisions were usually made by studios.

His debut filmTargets was a critical success, but it was the 1971 black-and-white drama The Last Picture Show that pushed him into the spotlight, gaining eight Academy Award nominations.

Two of Bogdanovich’s other biggest films were the Barbra Streisand screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon, the latter of which starred Ryan O’Neal and his daughter Tatum.

On the set of The Last Picture Show, he met actor and model Cybill Shepherd, whom he dated from 1971 to 1978.

Bogdanovich left his producer wife Polly Platt, with whom he had two children, for Shepherd. The pair worked on 1974’s Daisy Miller and 1975’s At Long Last Love together before splitting.

Pictured in 1973, the year ‘Paper Moon’ was released (Getty Images)

While he set up The Directors Company at Paramount along with Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin in 1972, this group dissolved after the release of Daisy Miller.

Bogdanovich directed films in every decade from the 1960s to 2010s, the most recent being the 2014 romcom She’s Funny That Way starring Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston and Kathryn Hahn.

In 2018, he helped finish and release Orson Welles’ long-lost film The Other Side of the Wind, in which he also starred.

As a film journalist and historian, he published multiple books and produced documentaries.

In addition to writing and directing, Bogdanovich also took on a number of acting roles, the most notable being on The Sopranos, where he played a psychotherapist. In recent years, he appeared in The Creatress and It Chapter Two.