Photograph of William Friedkin.
William Friedkin

Overview

William Friedkin (born August 29 1935 in Chicago, Illinois) is an Academy Award-winning American movie and television director, producer and screenwriter best known for directing The Exorcist and The French Connection in the early 1970s.

Career

After seeing the movie Citizen Kane as a boy, Friedkin became fascinated with movies and began working for WGN-TV immediately after high school. He eventually started his directorial career doing live television shows and documentaries, including The People vs. Paul Crump which won several awards and contributed to the commutation of Crump's death sentence. In 1965 Friedkin moved to Hollywood and two years later released his first feature film, Good Times starring Sonny and Cher. Several other "art" films followed (including the gay movie The Boys in the Band), although Friedkin did not want to be known as an art house director.

In 1971, his The French Connection was released to wide critical acclaim. Shot in a gritty style more suited for documentaries than Hollywood features, the film won five Academy Awards, including Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director.

Friedkin followed up with 1973's The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty's best-selling novel, which revolutionized the horror genre and is considered by some critics to be one of the greatest horror movies of all time. The Exorcist was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Following these two critically acclaimed pictures, Friedkin, along with Francis Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich, was deemed as one of the premier directors in Hollywood. Unfortunately, Friedkin's later movies did not achieve the same success. Sorcerer, an American remake of the movie Wages of Fear starring Roy Scheider, was overshadowed by the box office smash, Star Wars, which was released around the same time.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Friedkin's films received lackluster reviews and moderate ticket sales.

In 2000, The Exorcist was re-released in theaters with extra footage and grossed $40 million in the U.S. alone.

Friedkin's involvement in 2007's Bug resulted from a positive experience watching the stage version in 2004. He 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. http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=20415

Personal life

Friedkin has two sons: Jack (with actress Lesley-Anne Down) and Cedric, whose mother is Australian dancer Jennifer Nairn-Smith. He has been married four times, including a short marriage to French actress Jeanne Moreau. He is currently married to former film executive Sherry Lansing.

Filmography (as director)

Award information is from The Internet Movie Database (IMDb)http://imdb.com/.
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That biography says:

Miller was launched into stardom in 1973 by winning a Pulitzer Prize for his play, That Championship Season. That same year, he was offered the role of the troubled priest in William Friedkin's horror film The Exorcist (1973), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor...

That biography says:

...Dutton), for which he received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Actor in 1999) * the 1997 William Friedkin-directed 12 Angry Men (with Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott and Ossie Davis) * the Hallmark presentation The Boys Next Door (alongside Nathan Lane, Tony Goldwyn, and Michael Jeter) *The Tuskegee Airmen (with Laurence Fishburne and Andre Braugher) *the television production of August Wilson's play The Piano Lesson *The Affair, for which he received a 1996 CableACE Award nomination as Best Actor *the Showtime presentation Whitewash: The Clarence Brandley Story

That biography says:

...In these films Youngblood starred along with Joe Cortese , Steve James , and Deborah Van Valkenburgh. Both movies were directed by William Friedkin who is most noted for directing The Exorcist, The French Connection, and the Boys in the Band....

That biography says:

Another of the memorable moments in Hickman's career was when he was asked to perform a high-risk car chase scene by William Friedkin for his 1971 film The French Connection. As with Bullitt, The French Connection (also produced by Bullitt's producer, Philip D'Antoni) is famed for its car chase sequence, what differs from the usual car chase is that Gene Hackman’s character is chasing an elevated train from the street below (the scene was filmed in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with most of the action taking place on 86th Street), this chase involved real traffic and at one point Bill hits a car driven by a fellow stunt driver who missed his point, this scene was kept in the film by Friedkin as it added reality to the whole sequence, however the scene where the woman steps out into the street with a baby carriage was staged even though years of debate thought it to be a real incident with the women being unaware of the filming process, the fact she was captured from multiple angles including a close up of her facial reaction to seeing Bill’s car bearing down on her lends itself to being a staged event, although a very realistic one (This of course has as much to do with the Academy Award winning editing in that scene, done by Jerry Greenberg, as the driving by Hickman)...

That biography says:

Eddie Lawrence's film appearances were, at best, an afterthought to his other activities. Between 1968 and 1978 he had small roles in five features, starting with William Friedkin's 1968 recreation of 1920 New York City, The Night They Raided Minsky's. In this Norman Lear-produced-on-location tribute to the early days of burlesque, twelfth-billed Eddie played Scratch, a baggy-pants comic, whose brief scenes were sporadically interspersed throughout the film...

This biography says:

Friedkin has two sons: Jack (with actress Lesley-Anne Down) and Cedric, whose mother is Australian dancer Jennifer Nairn-Smith. He has been married four times, including a short marriage to French actress Jeanne Moreau. He is currently married to former film executive Sherry Lansing.

That biography says:

...During the writing and recording of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Gabriel was approached by director William Friedkin, allegedly because Friedkin had found Gabriel's short story in the liner notes to Genesis Live interesting...

That biography says:

...William Friedkin thought of Rabal for the French villain of his 1971 movie The French Connection. However, he could not remember the name of "that Spanish actor"...

That biography says:

...*Directors who have chosen Salerno to write or rewrite their films include Oscar winners Steven Spielberg (Thunder Below), Ron Howard (Bay of Pigs) William Friedkin (Night Train) Oscar nominees Michael Mann (The Border) and John Singleton (Shaft) and blockbuster directors Michael Bay (Armageddon), Wolfgang Petersen (L.A...

That biography says:

Based on William Peter Blatty's best-selling novel, The Exorcist was directed by William Friedkin, who had recently won an Oscar for directing The French Connection. The cast included Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller, Max Von Sydow and Kitty Winn...

That biography says:

...In 1968, he accepted the lead in the controversial and groundbreaking off-Broadway production of The Boys in the Band, the first play to explore the milieu of gay life in New York City in a graphically frank manner. He, together with the rest of the cast, went on to appear in the 1970 film version directed by William Friedkin....

That biography says:

Brian Tyler is a composer who has written, arranged, and conducted musical scores for film. His scores include the William Friedkin directed The Hunted and the 2005 supernatural action film Constantine. He is also signed with Sony Music as a songwriter...

That biography says:

...Outside his work as a cartoonist and illustrator, Druillet has also been active in architecture, rock opera, painting, sculpture and Digital Art. He worked as a designer on the film, Sorcerer directed by William Friedkin in 1976. He collaborated on Rolf Liebermann's Wagner Space Opera in the Opera de Paris in the late 70s to early 80s, and founded the Space Art Création in 1984...
How is William Friedkin connected to Roman Polanski? Tell the world.

That biography says:

...He appeared in another episode of NBC sitcom Will & Grace in November 2005, and appeared in additional three episodes in 2006. Bug, a film directed by William Friedkin, is a psychological thriller filmed in 2005, starring Connick, Ashley Judd, and Michael Shannon. The film will be released in 2007...
How is William Friedkin connected to Bob Fosse? Tell the world.

That biography says:

...He played the lead in the Otto Preminger all-star flop Skidoo (1966), co-starring Groucho Marx, in which Gleason's character and half the cast is imprisoned in Alcatraz and trips on LSD (including the guards, played by Slim Pickens and Fred Clark). Three years later, William Friedkin wanted to cast Gleason as "Popeye" Doyle in The French Connection (Friedkin's second choice after Paul Newman) but between Gigot and Skidoo, the studio refused to offer Gleason the lead in the film, even though he wanted to play it...

That biography says:

...Although some consider Lang's work to be simple melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that helped to establish the characteristics of film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity. His work influenced filmmakers as disparate as Jacques Rivette and William Friedkin. In 1931, between Metropolis and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, Lang directed what many film scholars consider to be his masterpiece: M, a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to trial by Berlin's criminal underworld...

That biography says:

...My idea was to do an old haunted house movie." The film was written by Carpenter and Debra Hill with Carpenter admitting that the film was inspired by both Dario Argento's Suspiria and William Friedkin's The Exorcist. Carpenter again worked with a relatively small budget of $325,000 and the film grossed over $65 million, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time...

This biography says:

...He has been married four times, including a short marriage to French actress Jeanne Moreau. He is currently married to former film executive Sherry Lansing.

That biography says:

...Lansing married Academy award winning director William Friedkin on 6 July, 1991.

That biography says:

...Flaherty *Richard Fleischer *Victor Fleming *Benedek Fliegauf *Chris Folino *John Ford *Miloš Forman *Willi Forst *Marc Forster *Bill Forsyth *Bob Fosse *Eytan Fox *Coleman Francis *Jesús Franco *Georges Franju *John Frankenheimer *Sidney Franklin *Stephen Frears *Mark Freiburger *Fridrik Thor Fridriksson *Lionel Friedberg *William Friedkin *Su Friedrich *Kinji Fukasaku *Lucio Fulci *Sam Fuller *Antoine Fuqua
How is William Friedkin connected to Lesley-Anne Down? Tell the world.
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How is William Friedkin connected to Cher? Tell the world.
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