Screenwriter, whose 1987 collaboration with Bernardo Bertolucci won nine Oscars, was also known for The Passenger directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
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. Mark was never without a notebook and a copy of the International Herald Tribune. He was a very impressive person.”
