Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas dies at 77
Jeremy Thomas, the British producer who won the Academy Award for best picture for Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor," died late on Friday, Sept. 11 at his country home in Oxfordshire. He was 77.
His team said he died peacefully surrounded by family and loved ones, as reported by Variety.
Thomas founded the Recorded Picture Company, his London production base, and co-founded Hanway Films, the sales company that licenses films to distributors territory by territory. Across five decades he helped bring to life more than 80 features. A producer in this sense pulls the project together, from raising finance and hiring the director to overseeing the shoot and the release plan.
The centre of that career was "The Last Emperor." Thomas won the best picture Oscar for the film in 1988. The film won nine Academy Awards in all, according to Variety.
He was born in London in 1949 into a film family. His father was director Ralph Thomas and his uncle was director Gerald Thomas. He started in cutting rooms and on sets before moving into producing. His first producer credit was the 1976 feature "Mad Dog Morgan."
From there his slate moved across borders and styles. He produced Nagisa Oshima's "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence," David Cronenberg's "Crash" and Jonathan Glazer's debut feature "Sexy Beast." The list put him alongside film-makers working in Japan, Canada and Britain. He did not stay tied to one studio or one national industry.
That international pattern held late into his seventies. He produced Werner Herzog's "Bucking Fastard," starring Rooney Mara and Kate Mara, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. His collaboration with Japanese director Takashi Miike, "Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo," was due to world premiere on Sept. 14 at the Toronto Film Festival, Variety reported.
Thomas was honoured by his peers in Europe with the European Film Award for Outstanding European Achievement in World Cinema in 2006. He was also the subject of Mark Cousins' documentary "The Storms of Jeremy Thomas," a portrait built around his work and travels.
For audiences, his name often appeared in small type at the start. For the industry, it signalled a particular kind of film: director-led, financed across countries, and made to travel.
