Donald Cammell

He has a cult reputation largely due to his debut film Performance, which he wrote the screenplay for and co-directed with Nicolas Roeg.

[1] Donald Seton Cammell was born 17 January 1934[2] in the Outlook Tower on Castlehill, on the approach to Edinburgh Castle in Scotland.

He was the elder son of the poet and writer Charles Richard Cammell (who wrote a book on occultist Aleister Crowley) and Iona Macdonald.

[4] Brought up in a bohemian atmosphere, Cammell was raised in an environment he described as "filled with magicians, metaphysicians, spiritualists and demons" including Aleister Crowley.

[8] After the end of a short-lived early marriage, he moved to New York to live with model Deborah Dixon and concentrate on painting nudes.

[citation needed] After Performance, he wrote a script called Ishtar that was to feature William Burroughs as a judge kidnapped while on holiday in Morocco.

[9] The next project Cammell managed to get made was a short called The Argument that was shot on location in the Utah desert by Vilmos Zsigmond on the sly in 1971.

Although not a personal project, this science fiction thriller (based on a book by Dean R. Koontz) featured many of Cammell's obsessions.

A two-hander between Christie and the computer, Demon Seed's mind games and closed environment are reminiscent of Performance, while the idea of the machine giving a child to the heroine and thus providing itself with a human incarnation is another example of Cammell's fascination with transformative sexuality.

He took 45 minutes to die, during which time he talked about his movie Performance (which features Mick Jagger's character being shot in the head in an assisted suicide) with his wife, China Kong, asking her to provide him with a mirror so he could witness his own death.