Peter Bogdanovich ComSE (July 30, 1939 – January 6, 2022) was an American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian.

As an actor, Bogdanovich was known for his roles in the HBO series The Sopranos and Orson Welles's last film, The Other Side of the Wind (2018), which he also helped finish.

He also published numerous books, some of which include in-depth interviews with friends Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles.

[18] In 1966, following the example of Cahiers du Cinéma critics François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer, who had created the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich decided to become a director.

Encouraged by director Frank Tashlin, whom he would interview in his book Who the Devil Made It, Bogdanovich headed for Los Angeles with his wife Polly Platt and in so doing, left his rent unpaid.

He worked with Corman on Targets, which starred Boris Karloff, and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, under the pseudonym Derek Thomas.

The resulting film included candid interviews with John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, and was narrated by Orson Welles.

Out of circulation for years due to licensing issues, Bogdanovich and TCM released it in 2006, re-edited it to make it "faster and more incisive", with additional interviews with Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill, Harry Carey Jr., Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and others.

In an interview with Robert K. Elder, author of The Film That Changed My Life, Bogdanovich explains his appreciation of Orson Welles's work:It's just not like any other movie you know.

The film earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, and won two statues, for Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories.

Bogdanovich cast the 21-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film and fell in love with her,[24] an affair leading to his divorce from Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two daughters.

[25] To cope with the tragedy, Bogdanovich began writing The Killing of the Unicorn, a memoir detailing the relationship between Stratten and himself, the making of They All Laughed and her murder.

[36] Stratten's murder was highly publicized, with Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate" article even claiming that she was as much a victim of Bogdanovich and Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner as she was Snider.

[8][38] After Stratten's murder, Bogdanovich said he "didn't go out much", but one day got a call from his friend John Cassavetes who asked him to direct Diahnne Abbott in a scene from his film Love Streams to help get him out of the house.

It is set 32 years after the events of The Last Picture Show, and Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd both reprised their roles as Duane and Jacy.

[43] After the release of Texasville, Bogdanovich revisited The Last Picture Show and produced a modified director's cut for The Criterion Collection which includes seven minutes of previously unseen footage and re-edited scenes.

One, Noises Off, was based on a stage play by Michael Frayn,[25] while another, The Thing Called Love, is better known as one of River Phoenix's last roles before his death.

[48] Drawing from his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, he wrote several critically lauded books, including Who the Devil Made It, featuring archival interviews that Bogdanovich had held with famous Hollywood directors, and Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week, which offered the lifelong cinephile's commentary on 52 of his favorite films.

[8] In 2001, Bogdanovich resurfaced with The Cat's Meow, his return once again to a reworking of the past, this time the alleged killing of director Thomas Ince by William Randolph Hearst.

Bogdanovich hosted introductions to movies on Criterion Collection DVDs, and had a supporting role in the critically praised mini-series Out of Order.

In 2012, Bogdanovich made news with an essay in The Hollywood Reporter, published in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting, in which he argued against excessive violence in the movies:Today, there's a general numbing of the audience.

[57]In 2014, Bogdanovich's last narrative film, She's Funny That Way, was released in theaters and on-demand, followed by the documentary, The Great Buster: A Celebration in 2018.

[60][61] In a July 2015 interview for Entertainment Weekly, Bogdanovich revealed that Brett Ratner was going to produce the film, and that they were currently in the process of attaching actors.

The plot, as described by Bogdanovich, would have followed a washed-up Hollywood director/star (someone like Orson Welles or Charlie Chaplin), who is visited by the ghost of his last wife, who was killed six years earlier in a plane crash.

[62][63] Bogdanovich collaborated with Turner Classic Movies, and host Ben Mankiewicz, to create a documentary podcast about his life, which premiered in 2020.

[67] Weeks before his death, Bogdanovich collaborated with Kim Basinger to create LIT Project 2: Flux, a first of its kind short film made available on the Ethereum blockchain as a non-fungible token.

[68] He also wrote an as-yet unreleased book called Five American Icons featuring long interviews with Arthur Miller, Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas, Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood,[69][24] and was working on developing a new screenplay, with the help of author Sam Kashner, titled Our Love Is Here to Stay about composers George and Ira Gershwin.

[12][72] Since his death, many directors, actors, and other public figures have paid tribute to him, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jennifer Aniston,[73] Barbra Streisand, Cher, William Friedkin, Guillermo del Toro, James Gunn, Ellen Burstyn, Laura Dern, Joe Dante, Bryan Adams, Ben Stiller, Jeff Bridges, Michael Imperioli,[74] Paul Feig and Viola Davis.

"[78] His work has been cited as an influence by such filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino,[79] David Fincher,[80] Sofia Coppola,[81] Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach,[82] Richard Linklater,[83][84] Edgar Wright,[85] Brett Ratner,[86] M. Night Shyamalan,[87] David O. Russell,[88] James Mangold,[89] Jon Watts,[90] Rian Johnson,[91][92] and the Safdie brothers.

[94] Cinematographer László Kovács has worked with Bogdanovich on several of his films, those of which are Targets, the documentary Directed by John Ford, What's Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, At Long Last Love, Nickelodeon and Mask.