Blake Edwards RIP

Blake Edwards obituary
Film director best known for the Pink Panther, Breakfast at Tiffany's and 10

Brian Baxter
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 16 December 2010

The film-maker Blake Edwards, who has died aged 88, will be best remembered as the creator of the Pink Panther films, and as the husband of the entertainer Julie Andrews. But Edwards was a third-generation show-business figure whose complex and controversial career spanned more than 50 years, initially as an actor and writer and subsequently as one of America's most prolific producer-directors, primarily concerned with the popular genres of comedy and musicals and with creating television series.

Despite working in mainstream cinema, his maverick spirit and ego made him an uneasy partner with Hollywood studios. He famously savaged the hand that had fed him so well with S.O.B. (1981), a raucous, vitriolic attack on Tinseltown. His sophisticated work drew strongly on his love of early cinema (his stepgrandfather had directed silent films), and on his own life and psychological problems (he wrote two movies with his psychoanalyst, Milton Wexler). He also reworked his own films and remade those of other directors.

Edwards was born William Blake Crump in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His parents divorced when he was young and he moved to Los Angeles with his mother. He began work as an extra, partly thanks to his stepfather, Jack McEdward, a film production manager. During his early 20s he appeared in some decent movies, including A Guy Named Joe (1943), which gave him income and time to write.

He created a radio series, Richard Diamond: Private Detective, for Dick Powell in 1948, and that year also wrote and starred in a modest western, Panhandle. He followed this with the screenplay for another western, Stampede (1949), and then concentrated on screenplays for the actor-turned-director Richard Quine, including All Ashore (1953) and the racing drama Drive a Crooked Road (1954), which starred Mickey Rooney. Edwards then devised a sitcom for Rooney, called Hey, Mulligan (1955).

Also in 1955, he cleverly updated My Sister Eileen for Quine, who had starred in the 1942 version. This bright musical introduced him to Jack Lemmon, one of many actors to feature regularly in Edwards's later films. Edwards then wrote and directed two films for the popular singer Frankie Laine, Bring Your Smile Along (1955) and He Laughed Last (1956).

By the age of 35, Edwards had served a successful Hollywood apprenticeship. In 1957 he joined forces with Tony Curtis on their first movie together, Mister Cory, starring Curtis as a guy who uses the path of a crooked gambler to escape the Chicago slums.

Edwards enjoyed his first real commercial hit with the second world war comedy Operation Petticoat (1959), cleverly uniting Curtis with the actor's hero Cary Grant. This and two successful TV series, Peter Gunn (1958-61) and Mr Lucky (1959-60), led him into the most successful decade of his career. The 1960 Bing Crosby vehicle High Time (in which Crosby dresses as a woman – an early example of one of Edwards's fixations) was followed by the sparkling Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), an adaptation of Truman Capote's novel, starring Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard and Rooney. It compounded his longterm relationship with Henry Mancini, whose score and theme song, Moon River, both won Oscars. They collaborated from High Time onwards, not least in the Panther movies, on a total of more than 20 movies.

Until 1962, Edwards had mainly worked on comedies and musicals, so he seemed an unlikely choice to direct Days of Wine and Roses, in which Lee Remick and Lemmon played a married couple whose descent into alcoholism is depicted in harrowing detail. Often recalled as his best feature, it contains performances of great intensity and probes darker corners than any of his other films.

He hit the jackpot with The Pink Panther (1963) and its first sequel, A Shot in the Dark (1964), with Peter Sellers as the bungling Inspector Clouseau. As the writer, producer and director of such hits, he could subsequently do as he wanted. The result was Hollywood's most expensive comedy to that date, The Great Race (1965), starring Curtis and Lemmon. This sprawling homage to silent cinema was dedicated to Laurel and Hardy. Although popular, it was not the box-office success its cost demanded.

In 1967, Edwards revived the private eye character from his earlier TV series and directed the feature film Gunn (1967), a quirky thriller in which Craig Stevens reprised his role. The clever but protracted comedy The Party (1968) revealed Edwards's disillusionment with the movie world, and starred Sellers as a famous Indian actor who, when invited to a swish Hollywood soiree, totally wrecks it.

Apart from Edwards's marriage (after a divorce from the actor Patricia Walker) to Andrews in 1969, the decade had ended less auspiciously than it began. He devised an elaborate wedding present for Andrews in the form of a lyrical love/spy story, Darling Lili (1970), set during the first world war. Time has been kinder to it than contemporary critics and audiences. It was the first of his films to suffer studio interference. When both his western Wild Rovers (1971) and a thriller, The Carey Treatment (1972), were also re-edited, he and Andrews set up home in Switzerland and began to work in England.

Another romantic spy drama, The Tamarind Seed (1974), enjoyed only modest success, so Edwards revived the Clouseau series with The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978). The first was highly successful, but the last suffered from Sellers's increasingly mannered performance. Nevertheless, the director's rehabilitation seemed complete enough for the US to welcome him back, and he made the riotously successful 10 (1979), with Dudley Moore as a randy, middle-aged composer who grades his girlfriends numerically. Andrews co-starred, but it was Bo Derek who took the attention and the project was his greatest non-Panther hit.

It allowed him extraordinary licence resulting in S.O.B., in which a suicidal director, played by one of his stalwarts, Richard Mulligan, is so dismayed by the response to a film that he revamps it as a porn flick. Edwards surrounded himself with other regular collaborators, headed by Andrews, who famously appeared topless, bringing an end to her wholesome Mary Poppins image. S.O.B. was described as tasteless. It was also a virulent and comic attack on the idiocies of showbusiness and a complex referral to both Edwards's past work and Hollywood itself.

Edwards once more returned to movie history with Victor Victoria (1982), a triumphant revamping of a 1933 German film. Andrews played a destitute singer who, with the connivance of a gay friend, poses as a man, impersonating a female singer. The film challenged the audience's notions of sexuality, not least through the hero (James Garner), who finds himself attracted to the (supposedly) male singer. It was an archetypal Edwards film with a glittering, stylish surface and a dark undertone.

Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) enjoyed less acclaim, especially the former, which dredged up material from earlier films, after the death of Sellers in 1980, and constructed a movie around them. Edwards was now co-writing with his son Geoffrey, and they were joined by Wexler for The Man Who Loved Women, a reworking of a 1977 François Truffaut film. The project gave full rein to the director's concerns with death, psychoanalysis and sex.

He resorted to his writing pseudonym, Sam O Brown, after an extremely unhappy period of work on the crime comedy City Heat, starring Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, which he had been slated to direct. He went on to direct Micki and Maude (1984) after the collapse of yet another project, then settled to reworking a Laurel and Hardy masterpiece, The Music Box (1932). The resulting film, A Fine Mess (1986), was to feature a version of the duo's great piano-moving sequence from the original film, but it was removed by the studio and the film stands as one indebted to silent cinema as a whole, not to a specific film.

For a modest $1.5m, Edwards made the apparently autobiographical That's Life (1986), again co-written with Wexler. He described it as a belated follow-up to 10, with Lemmon playing a 60-year-old character. The film was shot at Edwards's Malibu home and starred Andrews as well as his daughter Jennifer (a regular performer in his films) and many other friends and collaborators.

He enjoyed popular success by directing Blind Date (1987), in which Bruce Willis played an executive who arranges a business date, only to discover that she is dangerously incapable of holding her drink. He then returned to television, directing Justin Case (1988) and a remake of Peter Gunn (1989). Of his final features, among the best was Sunset (1988), in which Willis played the silent movies western star Tom Mix opposite Garner's ageing Wyatt Earp. A delightful portrait of a lost Hollywood, combined with a factually based thriller, the film failed commercially.

It was followed by the comedies Skin Deep (1989), infamous for its luminous condoms, and Switch (1991), starring Ellen Barkin, in which a chauvinist male is returned to earth as a woman. This complex, very funny movie showed that Edwards had retained his stylish, ironic and adult view of sexuality and relationships – a sophisticated attitude increasingly at odds with mainstream audiences.

Once again aiming at popular appeal, he returned to Clouseau, directing Son of the Pink Panther (1993), which starred Roberto Benigni as the illegitimate son of the legendary inspector. Aged 73, Edwards then directed Andrews in a Broadway production of Victor/Victoria, which opened in 1995 and ran for more than 700 performances.

He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2004 and had been preparing a stage musical based on the Pink Panther films. Andrews survives him, along with their children Amy and Jo, his stepdaughter Emma, and the children from his first marriage, Jennifer and Geoffrey.

• Blake Edwards (William Blake Crump), film director, screenwriter and producer, born 26 July 1922; died 15 December 2010

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