Hugh Hudson, director of ‘Chariots of Fire,’ dies at 86
Hugh Hudson, the director of the influential 1981 movie and 1982 Oscar finest image winner “Chariots of Fire,” died Friday at age 86.
“Hugh Hudson, 86, beloved husband and father, died at Charing Cross hospital on 10 February after a short illness,” the director’s household mentioned in a press release shared with the Guardian.
Actor Nigel Havers, who starred in “Chariots of Fire,” informed the Guardian he was “beyond devastated that my great friend Hugh Hudson, who I have known for more than 45 years, has died.”
“‘Chariots of Fire’ was one of the greatest experiences of my professional life, and, like so many others, I owe much of what followed to him,” Havers mentioned. “I shall miss him greatly.”
The 1981 drama was based mostly on the real-life rivalry between two sprinters, Eric Liddell, a religious Scottish Christian, and the English Harold Abrahams, who was Jewish, within the lead as much as the 1924 Olympics.
The movie noticed business and important success in each the United States and Britain and nabbed 4 Oscars, together with finest image and an award for its memorable rating.
In the U.K., “Chariots” was additionally seen as provocative, with the British Film Institute calling it “one of the decade’s most controversial British films, regarded by its left-leaning makers ([David] Puttnam, Hudson and the writer Colin Welland) as a radical indictment of Establishment snobbery and privilege, but appropriated by others as a conservative paean to Thatcherite values of individualism and enterprise.”
Hudson adopted up his success with “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes,” which additionally garnered Oscar nominations, and in 1985 “Revolution,” a historic drama starring Al Pacino and Donald Sutherland concerning the American Revolutionary War. However, the latter drama bombed on the field workplace and with critics, incomes Hudson a Golden Raspberry award for guiding.
Upon the rerelease of “Chariots of Fire” in 2012, simply earlier than the Summer Olympics in London, Hudson mentioned he hoped extra numerous audiences would establish with the movie’s themes and its character Abrahams, who within the movie is “fighting for himself, his rights, who he is.”
Hudson is survived by his spouse, Maryam, his son, Thomas, and his ex-wife, Sue.