LEWIS JOHN CARLINO

(1 January 1932 - 17 June 2020)

The American screenwriter-director Lewis John Carlino, who has died aged 88, was born in New York to Italian immigrants, but studied film and drama in Los Angeles. Beginning as a playwright off-Broadway, he soon crossed over to films. Following some TV episodes he adapted for John Frankenheimer David Ely’s novel Seconds, about a man faking death to create a new identity. Sadly, he woke up as Rock Hudson! Carlino’s next adaptation was The Fox, a D.H. Lawrence story, but The Brotherhood was an original screenplay about the Mafia with Kirk Douglas, while A Reflection of Fear with Robert Shaw was adapted from Stanton Forbes’ chiller-thriller. The Mechanic was a good action original for Charles Bronson, as was Crazy Joe for Peter Boyle. Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea was another adaptation (which Carlino also directed), as were I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (gaining Carlino’s only Oscar-nomination), the Carlino-directed The Great Santini with Robert Duvall and Haunted Summer, about the poets Byron and Shelley. Carlino’s own story, Resurrection, about a woman (Ellen Burstyn) surviving the afterlife, was a film in 1980 (and remade for TV in 1999). Class with Rob Lowe was directed but not written by Carlino. Between films he wrote TV features and created the Doc Elliot series. He was first married to Natelle Lamkin, with whom he had three children, and from 1976 to Jill Denise Chadwick until her death in 2015.

MICHAEL DARVELL