Mark Peploe, Oscar-winning scriptwriter of The Last Emperor, dies aged 82
Mark Peploe, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who collaborated with some of the greatest names in European film-making including Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci, has died aged 82. Peploe's family told the Guardian he died in Florence, Italy, after a long illness.
Peploe's prominence centred on the screenplays he wrote for some of the great European directors of the era, notably Italian new wave auteurs Antonioni and Bertolucci. Despite its chequered release history, the 1975 film The Passenger, directed by Antonioni and starring Jack Nicholson, has since been acclaimed as one the decade's cinematic masterpieces, and Peploe went on to forge a regular partnership with Bertolucci, winning an Oscar in 1988 for best adapted screenplay for The Last Emperor.
Jeremy Thomas, producer of The Last Emperor, told the Guardian: 'Mark was a Renaissance man, a brilliant writer of screenplays, and also an artist – he had a particular gift of a cultivation of the past which informed him as a writer. He was a very impressive person.'
Peploe was born in 1943 in Nairobi into an artistic family. His grandfather on his father's side was celebrated Scottish colourist SJ Peploe, while on his mother's he was the great-grandson of German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand. (His mother, Clotilde, was also a painter of note and his father, Willy, was an art dealer.) After a brief period living in a villa the family owned in Florence, Peploe studied at Oxford university, and was subsequently hired by London-based Canadian producer Allan King, working on documentaries about a wide range of creative figures including writer Norman Mailer, op-art pioneer Victor Vasarely and Never on Sunday star Melina Mercouri.
Peploe said he turned to writing after becoming 'frustrated' with documentary-making: 'I thought that if you wrote the script, you would be able to control the movie more than I did. It was an illusion, but I thought so at the time!' Peploe worked on the script for Jacques Demy's 1972 musical The Pied Piper (starring Donovan and Diana Dors), and then had his story The Passenger – originally titled Fatal Exit – picked up by Antonioni as the third in the Italian director's trilogy of English-language films, following Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point.
After co-writing the script with film theorist Peter Wollen, Peploe had intended to direct the film himself, but producer Carlo Ponti offered it to Antonioni after the latter's earlier project, entitled Technically Sweet, was shut down over budgetary concerns. Starring Nicholson as a TV reporter who swaps identities with a dead man, The Passenger also features Maria Schneider and Jenny Runacre and became renowned for a seven-minute tracking shot during its final scene. Due to a dispute with producers MGM, Nicholson acquired the rights to the film, and it re-emerged in the mid-2000s to considerable acclaim.
Peploe's sister Clare was also a film-maker, and the pair collaborated on the script for High Season, her directorial debut in 1987. The same year also saw the release of The Last Emperor, on which Peploe had worked with Bertolucci (who had married Clare in 1979). Produced by Thomas, the film won nine Oscars in 1988 for its lavish treatment of the story of Chinese emperor Puyi, who was deposed in 1912 but allowed to live in Beijing's Forbidden City until 1924. Peploe subsequently worked on two more of Bertolucci's films: the Paul Bowles adaptation The Sheltering Sky, released in 1990, and Little Buddha, starring Keanu Reeves as Prince Siddhartha, in 1994.
Peploe achieved his ambition of moving into directing with the 1991 psychological horror Afraid of the Dark, starring James Fox and Fanny Ardant, which has become something of a cult film, and an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's story Victory, released in 1996 and starring Willem Dafoe and Irène Jacob.
Peploe is survived by his partner, art historian Alina Payne; he was previously married to costume designer Louise Stjernsward, with whom he had a daughter Lola, and was subsequently in a longterm relationship with Gina Marcou.
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