Celebrated director of The Exorcist and The French Connection, William Friedkin, dies at 87

William Friedkin, who has died in Los Angeles at the age of 87, was among a tight handful of directors who dragged Hollywood out of its complacency in the early 1970s. Like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman, he combined an interest in the European greats with a passion for Hollywood’s golden years to create a still-thrilling amalgam. And he directed genuine hits.

The French Connection, an unprecedentedly rough-hewn cop thriller filmed on the streets of New York City, won the best picture Oscar and became the third highest-grossing film in the US of 1971. That success offered, however, little preparation for what was to come two years later with The Exorcist. The adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s horror novel was beyond a sensation. The television news buzzed with tales of audience members fainting in the aisles. Social scientists saw the possessed child at the heart of the story as a useful stand in for the recently radicalised offspring of confused, straight-arrow parents.

Barely a day went passed when Friedkin was not asked about The Exorcist.

“Very rarely. But I don’t mind. I still love the film,” he told me in 2012. “You know, many of those stories are true. There was a story about a classmate of Prince Charles’s who, after seeing the film, ran into a church and immolated himself.”

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He never quite equalled that success again. How could he? But he continued to make interesting and awkward films right up until his death. One last feature will now premiere posthumously.

William Friedkin was born in Chicago to working-class parents. Dad did a range of jobs. Mom was an operating-room nurse. After public school — at which he did not excel — he landed a job in the mail room of a Chicago TV station. He somehow finessed that into directing live shows and documentaries. Alfred Hitchcock famously told him off for not wearing a tie when directing a late episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

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[ Still in motion ]

His late 1960s were fitful, but productive. A feature called Good Times for the pop duo Sonny and Cher. An adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party with Robert Shaw and Patrick Magee. By the time he came to The French Connection he already had a reputation as an imaginative director of actors. Starring Gene Hackman as tough cop Popeye Doyle, the film had a loose, quasi-documentary quality that remains striking to this day. There was something of the French New Wave in its vigorous camera moves. And it has one of the greatest car chases ever.

“The studio didn’t really understand the film until it came out,” he told me. “They didn’t promote it that much. They released it in some areas as a double feature. But for some reason – with the grace of God – it just came out of the gate like a thoroughbred.”

Friedkin was an extraordinary talker. You didn’t interview him. You just set him off and let him jaw for America. He had a fine self-deprecatory humour and did not balk when legends about his allegedly extreme behaviour were brought up. He was said to have discharged firearms on set. It was rumoured he walloped Father William O’Malley, playing an older priest on The Exorcist, as a way of generating sincere tears. That last one seemed to be true.

“I took him aside and said: ‘You know I love you’,” he told me. “He said: ‘Yes and I love you like a brother in Christ.’ I turned away and turned back and struck him so hard that he was shocked and surprised. It brought back a sense memory and we did it all in one take.”

Friedkin followed up The Exorcist with a financially ruinous remake of Georges Clouzot’s 1953 suspense drama The Wages of Fear entitled Sorcerer. Following a group of truck drivers transporting dynamite through hazardous jungle, the film has, in recent decades, been re-evaluated as a classic of its era. Cruising, starring Al Pacino as a cop investigating murders in New York’s gay scene, remains controversial. The thrilling To Live and Die in L.A. from 1985 staged a car chase to compare with that in The French Connection.

He never stopped working and, in the current century, found critical acclaim for his characteristically arresting adaptations of two Tracy Letts plays: Bug from 2006 starred Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in a claustrophobic nightmare; Killer Joe from 2011 cast Matthew McConaughey in the blackest of crime comedies. The news of his death comes just three weeks before his take on Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Clarke, premieres out of competition at the Venice Film Festival.

His wife Sherry Lansing, former CEO of Paramount Pictures and president of production at 20th Century Fox, survives him after 32 years of marriage. He was previously married to the actresses Jeanne Moreau and Lesley-Anne Down, and to the journalist Kelly Lange.

“No, no, no!,” he replied when I asked him if he had any regrets. “For God’s sake, Donald, if you get to be a movie director and express yourself in a mass medium, you’re damned lucky. I look upon myself as a damn lucky man.”