20 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.

Nicolas Roeg's father was of Dutch ancestry and worked in the diamond trade, but lost a lot of money when his investments failed in South Africa.

Nicolas Roeg had said that he entered the film industry only because there was a studio across the road from his home in Marylebone.

In 1947, after completing National Service, 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 a second-unit cinematographer on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia and this led to Lean's hiring Roeg as cinematographer on his next film, Doctor Zhivago ; however, Roeg's creative vision clashed with that of Lean and eventually he was fired from the production and replaced by Freddie Young, who received sole credit for cinematography when the film was released in 1965.

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 on 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 own son Luc as the boy, and David Gulpilil as the Aboriginal boy.

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.

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 married to Harriet Harper from 2005 until his death in 2018.

On 23 November 2018, Nicolas Roeg died in London at the age of 90.

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".