William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist and The French Connection, dead at 87

William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director who became a top filmmaker in his 30s with the gripping The French Connectionand the horrifying The Exorcistand struggled in the following decades to match his early success, has died. He was 87.

Friedkin, who won the best director Oscar for The French Connection,died Monday in Los Angeles, his wife, producer and former studio head Sherry Lansing, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The movie, based on a true story, deals with the efforts of maverick New York City police detective James "Popeye" Doyle to track down Frenchman Fernando Rey, mastermind of a large drug pipeline funnelling heroin into the United States. It contains one of the most thrilling chase scenes ever filmed.

The movie also won Academy Awards for best picture, screenplay and film editing and led critics to hail Friedkin, then just 32, as a leading member of a new generation of filmmakers.

He followed with an even bigger blockbuster, The Exorcist,based on William Peter Blatty's bestselling novel about a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil.

The harrowing scenes of the girl's possession and a splendid cast including Linda Blair as the girl, Ellen Burstyn as her mother and Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller as the priests who try to exorcise the devil from her helped make the film a box-office sensation. It was so scary for its era that many viewers fled the theatre before it was over, and some reported being unable to sleep for days afterward.

It received 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Friedkin as director, and won two, for Blatty's script and for sound.

With that second success, Friedkin would go on to direct movies and TV shows well into the 21st century. But he would never again come close to matching the success of those early works.

Other film credits included To Live and Die in L.A.,Cruising,Rules of Engagementand a TV remake of the classic play and Sidney Lumet movie 12 Angry Men.Friedkin also directed episodes for such TV shows as The Twilight Zone,Rebel Highwayand CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

The Godfather and Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola mourned Friedkin in an Instagram post on Monday.

"William Friedkin was my first friend among the filmmakers of my generation, and I grieve for the loss of a much-loved companion," Coppola wrote.

"It's very hard to grasp that I will never enjoy his company again, but his work will at least stand in for him."

'I was young and I didn't give a damn'

Born in Chicago on Aug. 29, 1935, Friedkinbegan working in local TV productions as a teenager. By age 16, he was directing live shows.

"My main influence was dramatic radio when I was a kid," he said in a 2001 interview. "I remember listening to it in the dark, everything was left to the imagination. It was just sound. I think of the sounds first and then the images."

He moved from live shows to documentaries, making The People Vs. Paul Crump,in 1962. It was the story of a prison inmate who rehabilitates himself ondeath row after being sentenced for the murder of a guard during a botched robbery at a Chicago food plant.

WATCH | Friedkin's CBC interview with George Stroumboulopoulos:

William Friedkin

13 years ago

Duration 9:09

George interviews William Friedkin

Producer David Wolper was so impressed with it that he brought Friedkin to Hollywood to direct network TV shows.

After working on such shows as The Bold Ones,The Alfred Hitchcock Hourand the 1966 documentary The Thin Blue Line,Friedkin landed his first film, 1967's Good Times.It was a lighthearted musical romp headlined by the pop duo Sonny and Cher in what would be their only movie appearance together.

He followed that with The Night They Raided Minsky's,about backstage life at a burlesque theatre, and The Birthday Party,from a Harold Pinter play. He then gained critical attention with 1970's The Boys in the Band,a landmark film about gay men.

Friedkin had three brief marriages in the 1970s and '80s, to French actress Jeanne Moreau; British actress Lesley-Anne Down, with whom he had a son; and longtime Los Angeles TV news anchor Kelly Lange. In 1991, he married Paramount studio executive Lansing.

In recent years, Friedkin was often called on to reflect on his career around the 50th anniversaries of his classics and was always candid. He also wrote a memoir, The Friedkin Connection,which came out in 2012. And he wasn't done working yet: A new film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,starring Kiefer Sutherland, is set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival next month.

Thinking back to the iconic car chase sequence in The French Connection,Friedkin told NBC News in 2021 that it was legitimately life-threatening and that he'd never do it again.

"Everything you see, we actually did. There was no CGI then. There was no way to fake it. I just put the pedal to the metal, and we went 90 miles an hour in city traffic," he said. "The fact that nobody got hurt is a miracle. The fact that I didn't get killed, the fact that some of the crew members didn't get hurt or killed. That's a chance I would never take again. I was young and I didn't give a damn. I just went out and did it. I set out to make a great chase scene and I didn't care about the consequences, and now I do."