Donald Cammell
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Donald Cammell | |
---|---|
Born | 17 January 1934 Edinburgh, Scotland |
Died | 24 April 1996 Los Angeles, California | (aged 62)
Occupation(s) | Painter, screenwriter, film director |
Spouses | |
Children | Amadis (b. 1959) |
Donald Seton Cammell (17 January 1934 – 24 April 1996) was a Scottish painter, screenwriter, and film director. He has a cult reputation largely due to his debut film Performance, which he wrote the screenplay for and co-directed with Nicolas Roeg. He died by suicide after the last film he directed, Wild Side, was taken away from him and recut by the production company.[1]
Biography
Early years
Donald Cammell was born 17 January 1934
Brought up in a bohemian atmosphere, Donald Cammell was raised in an environment he described as "filled with magicians, metaphysicians, spiritualists and demons" including Aleister Crowley. Charles Richard Cammell, his father, knew Crowley personally and was an admirer of the magus, particularly of his poetry. In Charles Cammell's 1962 biography Aleister Crowley: The Man: The Mage: The Poet, he wrote that Crowley "was a poet of lyric genius.".[5]
Because of his father's relationship with the diabolist, Donald Cammell met Crowley. He claimed that he sat on Crowley's lap.[6] As an actor, Cammell would play Osiris in Lucifer Rising, a film made by Kenneth Anger, a Crowley disciple who based the film on Crowley's poem "Hymn to Lucifer".[7]
Painting career
Cammell was a precociously gifted painter, winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy at the age of 16. He subsequently studied in Florence with Annigoni and made his living as a society portrait painter. In 1953, one of his portraits was hailed as "society portrait of the year".[8]
After the end of a short-lived early marriage, he moved to New York to live with model Deborah Dixon and concentrate on painting nudes.
Cinema career
In 1961, he moved to Paris and began writing screenplays; first, a thriller called
After
The next project Cammell managed to get made was a short called The Argument (1971/99) that was shot on location in the Utah desert by Vilmos Zsigmond on the sly. Cammell had obtained the camera on the grounds that Zsigmond was shooting tests for another film. This confrontation between a frustrated film director and a goddess (played by Myriam Gibril, Cammell's lover and Isis to his Osiris in Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising) covers many of Cammell's favourite themes, but Cammell never completed the film. It was rediscovered and put together by his editor, Frank Mazzola, in 1999.
Cammell's next feature was
Cammell had to wait until 1987 to complete another project,
His final film Wild Side (1995) was a troubled production. Financed by Nu Image, a production company that made exploitation pictures, Cammell was hired to shoot an art film as a prestige project, to boost Nu Image's stature in the movie industry. As Cammell shot and edited his film, the producers became anxious over his artistic avant-garde techniques. Nu Image executives reportedly demanded that he include more nudity in the film. Ultimately, they took over the film, abandoning Cammell's cut and re-cutting the film to eliminate his innovative cross-cutting (a technique that goes back to Performance) to create a more linear narrative, and inserting more nudity.[1] The Nu Image cut made the narrative incoherent and was disowned by Cammell.
Cammell's brother said after his brother's suicide that the production company's interference made him consider retaliating with violence. David Cammell said, "...at one point he [Donald] was going to go and shoot [producer] Eli Cohen, but I managed to persuade him that it was a negative thing to shoot your producer and then shoot yourself."[1]
Personal life
Cammell was married twice, first to the Greek actress Maria Andipa (m. 1954), by whom he had a son Amadis (b. 1959), and then to the American writer China Kong (m. 1978), with whom he started an affair when she was 14. He is survived by his son and his second wife.[9]
Death
On the night of April 24, 1996, Cammell shot himself in the head in his Hollywood Hills home. He took 45 minutes to die, during which time he talked about his movie Performance (which features Mick Jagger's character being shot in the head in an assisted suicide) with his wife, China Kong, asking her to provide him with a mirror so he could witness his own death. Friends told the press he was suffering from severe chronic depression.[10][11] Cammell's depression reportedly was exacerbated by the studio's recutting of his recent movie Wild Side without his permission.[12]
Filmography
- Duffy (1968)
- Performance, with Nicolas Roeg (1968; released 1970)
- Demon Seed (1977)
- White of the Eye(1987)
- The Argument (1971; released 1998)
- Wild Side (1995; director's cut released in 1999)
- Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance (1999)
References
- ^ a b c Le Cain, Maximillian. "Cammell, Donald". sensesofcinema.com. Senses of Cinema. Retrieved 16 October 2023.
- ISBN 9780748622313.
- ^ "Donald Cammell: Obituary". The Independent. 8 May 1996. Retrieved 28 May 2018.
- ISBN 9781407089485. Retrieved 15 October 2015.
- OCLC 558120674. Retrieved 16 October 2023.
- ^ "Aleister Crowley". Performance the Film. Retrieved 16 October 2023.
- ISBN 978-0-06-016700-4.
- OCLC 941068494.
- ^ "Donald Seton Cammell". Herald Scotland. Retrieved 24 May 2018.
- ^ Musetto, V.A. "THE 'PERFORMANCE' OF A LIFETIME". nypost.com. New York Post. Retrieved 15 October 2023.
- ^ Macnab, Geoffrey (30 April 1998). "Film: What a great performance". The Independent. Retrieved 15 March 2017.
- ^ King, Susan. "Five noted directors who committed suicide". latimes.com. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 15 October 2023.