Donald Cammell

Son of writer/poet Charles Richard Cammell, heir to one of England's largest shipping fortunes, lost in the stock crash of the 1930s.

British director Donald Cammell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1934, came from a wealthy shipbuilding family. He began his career as a painter and by the mid-'60s was celebrated among the "Swinging London" crowd.

Art prodigy as a child, trained at the Royal Academy School of Art, became a celebrated portrait painter in London in the 1950s.

He made his foray into the film industry when he wrote the script for The Touchables (1968), a painfully pretentious--and, seen today, terribly dated--tale of a rock singer kidnapped by four beautiful female fans.

He followed that up with Duffy (1968), about an aging hippie who helps two brothers rob their rich father.

His directorial debut came with Performance (1970), about a London gangster who hides out in the house of a strange rock star. The now cult-classic film starred Mick Jagger in one of his earliest dramatic performances.

Cammell's Demon Seed (1977) was intended to be a comedy, but the studio for some reason decided to turn it into a bizarre sci-fi thriller, which didn't really satisfy anyone, Cammell least of all.

In 1979, Marlon Brando proposed him that they collaborate on a China Seas pirate story called "Fan Tan". Brando improvised scenes and Cammell wrote a 165-page treatment, but the star soon lost interest in it. In 1982, on Brando's request, Cammell worked the same material into an incomplete novel. Brando, however, dropped the project again, but China Kong revived it after Brando's death. Knopf's Sonny Mehta hired film critic David Thomson to gather the extant materials and finish the book which was published in 2005.

He didn't make a film for ten years after "Demon Seed", when he directed the atmospheric White of the Eye (1987), about a serial killer.

In 1988 Marlon Brando, impressed by White of the Eye (1987), employed Cammell to direct a script he had written called "Jericho", an ultra-violent action thriller. Brando would play Billy Harrington, a retired government assassin coerced back into action by evil CIA operatives who introduce his daughter to a Colombian druglord's son, who falls for her. Harrington, named after Brando's psychiatrist who had died recently, embarks on an ultraviolent rescue mission. Andy Garcia, Rubén Blades, Rita Moreno, Quincy Jones and Julia Roberts were going to star in the project. According to Cammell, the body count was huge: "He [Brando] kills everybody - everybody! - in the last reel." Producer Elliott Kastner paid Brando $3 million up front, but after eighteen months of work, while on pre-production in Mexico and with shooting only days away, Brando dropped out, claiming he couldn't get insurance. Kastner went bankrupt, and Cammell went back to his typewriter.

Adapted for the screen, together with author J.C. Pollock, the book "Centrifuge". In May 1989 it was announced that the action/thriller project would be filmed the following summer in Toronto and Northern Ontario, Canada, with Don Johnson playing an ex-CIA agent pursued by both his ex-bosses and the KGB. James Bond veteran John Glen was going to direct for producers Euan Lloyd and Chris Chrisafis, but in the end this Vestron produced movie project never happened.

Was offered the chance to direct Bad Influence (1990) and Robocop 2 (1990).

His final film as director, Wild Side (1995), was a thriller that was extensively re-edited by the producers. Cammell was so incensed with the result that he had his name taken off the credits, and it was credited to the non-existent "Frank Brauner".