Jonathan Demme

Jonathan Demme was an American filmmaker whose career spanned more than thirty years and encompassed over seventy feature films, documentaries and television productions. He began as a producer and co-writer for exploitation filmmaker Roger Corman before directing his own debut, the 1974 women-in-prison film Caged Heat, and went on to make humanist works such as Melvin and Howard, Something Wild and Married to the Mob. His 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs won five Academy Awards including Best Director and Best Picture, one of only three films to sweep the major categories, and he followed it with the AIDS drama Philadelphia in 1993. He also directed the concert film Stop Making Sense, the gothic drama Beloved, and the thriller The Manchurian Candidate. He died in Manhattan in 2017 at age 73 from complications of esophageal cancer and heart disease.