18 Facts About Nicolas Roeg

Nicolas Jack Roeg was an English film director and cinematographer, best known for directing Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing and The Witches.

Nicolas Roeg had an older sister, Nicolette, who was an actress.

In 1947, after completing national service in the British Army as a unit projectionist, Nicolas Roeg entered the film business as a tea boy, moving up to clapper-loader, the bottom rung of the camera department, at Marylebone Studios in London.

Nicolas Roeg was credited as cinematographer on Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death and Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, as well as John Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd and Richard Lester's Petulia; the latter is the last film on which Roeg was solely credited for cinematography and shares many characteristics and similarities with Roeg's work as a director.

Nicolas Roeg followed up with Walkabout, which tells the story of an English teenage girl and her younger brother who are abandoned in the Australian Outback by their father after his suicide and forced to fend for themselves, with the help of an Aboriginal boy on his walkabout.

Nicolas Roeg cast Jenny Agutter in the role of the girl, his son Luc as the boy, and David Gulpilil as the Aboriginal boy.

Similarly to Performance, Nicolas Roeg cast musicians in leading roles for his next two films, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Bad Timing.

In 1986, Nicolas Roeg was approached by then Secretary of State for Health and Social Services Norman Fowler and the advertising agency TBWA to direct the British government's public health campaign AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance.

Nicolas Roeg was selected to direct an adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's novel The Witches by Jim Henson, who had procured the film rights to the book in 1983.

Nicolas Roeg made only three theatrical films following The Witches: Cold Heaven, Two Deaths and Puffball.

Nicolas Roeg did a small amount of work for television, including Sweet Bird of Youth, an adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, and Heart of Darkness and an episode of George Lucas's Young Indiana Jones.

Nicolas Roeg did not make any more films after 2007, but published a memoir, The World Is Ever Changing, in 2013.

Nicolas Roeg's films are known for having scenes and images from the plot presented in a disarranged fashion, out of chronological and causal order, requiring the viewer to do the work of mentally rearranging them to comprehend the story line.

Nicolas Roeg introduced the retrospective with Miranda Richardson, who starred in Puffball.

From 1957 to 1977, Nicolas Roeg was married to English actress Susan Stephen.

In 1982, Nicolas Roeg married American actress Theresa Russell and they had two sons: Maximillian and Statten Nicolas Roeg.

Nicolas Roeg was then married to Harriet Harper from 2005 until his death, from dementia, on 23 November 2018, at a nursing home in Ladbroke Grove, London.

Filmmaker Duncan Jones, the son of David Bowie, who starred in The Man Who Fell to Earth, paid tribute to Nicolas Roeg, calling him a "great storyteller" and "inimitable".