ALAN PARKER
(14 February 1944 - 31 July 2020)
The British writer-director-producer Alan Parker, who has died aged 76 after a long illness, started his working life as an advertising copywriter, often filming his own award-winning TV commercials. After making a couple of shorts, Footsteps and Our Cissy, he wrote Melody (1971) - aka S.W.A.L.K. in the UK - an innocent romance between two children played by Mark Lester and Tracy Hyde. Then he wrote and directed No Hard Feelings, a love story set during the Blitz. It wasn’t shown by the BBC until 1976. Before that was another BBC film, The Evacuees, Jack Rosenthal’s script about two Jewish boys evacuated during the war. A mark of Parker’s work was his wide range of genres. Midnight Express is a prison drama about drug-smuggling in Turkey, whereas Fame details the lives of musical students at the High School of Performing Arts in New York. Shoot the Moon is a marital drama with Albert Finney and Diane Keaton. By now well-established as a director, Parker went on to do Pink Floyd – The Wall, then Birdy, about Vietnam vets Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage, Angel Heart, a psychological horror story with Mickey Rourke and, as Lucifer, Robert De Niro, and Mississippi Burning, a thriller set against Ku Klux Klan activities, with Gene Hackman. The best of Parker’s 1990s films is The Commitments, about music-obsessed kids in Dublin. Evita with Madonna works up to a point, and Angela’s Ashes is a moving story about author Frank McCourt’s childhood in Dublin. Parker’s last film (in 2003), The Life of David Gale, has Kevin Spacey as a man on Death Row in Texas. Parker received many industry awards, including a Bafta for his screenplay to Bugsy Malone and two more Baftas for directing Midnight Express and The Commitments and Oscar-nominations for Midnight Express and Mississippi Burning. In 2013, he received the Bafta Fellowship. He was made a CBE in 1995 and was knighted in 2002. He married and divorced Annie Inglis and then married the producer Lisa Moran. He is the father of a daughter Lucy and four sons, Henry, Alexander, Jake and the screenwriter Nathan Parker.
MICHAEL DARVELL