1. William David Friedkin was an American film, television and opera director, producer, and screenwriter who was closely identified with the "New Hollywood" movement of the 1970s.
33 Facts About William Friedkin
1. 2.
William Friedkin worked extensively as an opera director from 1998 until his death, and directed various television films and series episodes for television.
3.
William Friedkin was born in Chicago, Illinois, on August 29,1935, the son of Rachael and Louis William Friedkin.
4.
William Friedkin's father was a semi-professional softball player, merchant seaman, and men's clothing salesman.
5.
William Friedkin's mother, whom Friedkin called "a saint," was a nurse.
6.
William Friedkin's parents were Jewish emigrants from Ukraine, in the Russian empire.
7.
William Friedkin's father was somewhat uninterested in making money, and the family was generally lower middle class while he was growing up.
8.
William Friedkin was not a serious student and barely received grades good enough to graduate, which he did at the age of 16.
9.
William Friedkin said this was because of social promotion and not because he was bright.
10.
William Friedkin began going to movies as a teenager, and cited Citizen Kane as one of his key influences.
11.
Several sources claim that William Friedkin saw this motion picture as a teenager, but William Friedkin himself said that he did not see the film until 1960, when he was 25 years old.
12.
Only then, William Friedkin said, did he become a true cineaste.
13.
William Friedkin began working in the mail room at WGN-TV immediately after high school.
14.
William Friedkin's efforts included The People vs Paul Crump, which won an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and contributed to the commutation of Crump's death sentence.
15.
In 1965, William Friedkin moved to Hollywood and two years later released his first feature film, Good Times starring Sonny and Cher.
16.
Whereas Coppola directed The Conversation and Bogdanovich, the Henry James adaptation, Daisy Miller, William Friedkin abruptly left the company, which was closed by Paramount.
17.
William Friedkin considered it his finest film, and was personally devastated by its financial and critical failure.
18.
In 1980, William Friedkin directed an adaptation of the Gerald Walker crime thriller Cruising, starring Al Pacino, which was protested during production and remains the subject of heated debate.
19.
William Friedkin had a heart attack on March 6,1981, due to a genetic defect in his circumflex left coronary artery, and nearly died.
20.
In 1985, William Friedkin directed the music video for Barbra Streisand's rendition of the West Side Story song "Somewhere", which she recorded for her twenty-fourth studio LP, The Broadway Album.
21.
William Friedkin later appears as Streisand's interviewer on the television special, "Putting It Together: The Making of the Broadway Album".
22.
William Friedkin next directed the cult classic horror film The Guardian and the thriller Jade, starring Linda Fiorentino.
23.
William Friedkin directed the 2006 film Bug due to a positive experience watching the stage version in 2004.
24.
William Friedkin was surprised to find that he was, metaphorically, on the same page as the playwright and felt that he could relate well to the story.
25.
In 2011, William Friedkin directed Killer Joe, a black comedy written by Tracy Letts based on Letts' play, and starring Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple, Gina Gershon, and Thomas Haden Church.
26.
In 2017, William Friedkin directed the documentary The Devil and Father Amorth about the ninth exorcism of a woman in the Italian village of Alatri.
27.
William Friedkin cited Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut, and Akira Kurosawa as influences.
28.
In regard to influences of specific films on his films, William Friedkin noted that The French Connection['s] documentary-like realism was the direct result of the influence of having seen Z, a French film by Costa-Gavras:.
29.
William Friedkin began a four-year relationship with Australian dancer and choreographer Jennifer Nairn-Smith in 1972.
30.
William Friedkin and his second wife, Lesley-Anne Down, had a son, Jack, born in 1982.
31.
William Friedkin was raised Jewish, but called himself an agnostic later in life, although he said that he strongly believed in the teachings of Jesus Christ.
32.
William Friedkin died from heart failure and pneumonia at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles on August 7,2023.
33.
William Friedkin had been set to direct the premiere of an opera titled An Inconvenient Truth to debut in 2011, but he later departed from it when creative differences arose between him and the librettist.