William Friedkin was the American director who shot fiction like documentary and made The Exorcist the hinge film of modern horror.
Quick Specs
- Born: 29 August 1935, Chicago, Illinois
- Died: 7 August 2023, Bel Air, Los Angeles (aged 87) — heart failure and pneumonia
- Full name: William David Friedkin
- Known for: The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer, To Live and Die in L.A., Bug
- Formation: Chicago live television and documentary — no film school
- Years active: 1962–2023
Overview
He learned filmmaking in a Chicago TV mailroom and on death row, and it shows in everything: William Friedkin shot fiction the way documentaries are shot — real streets, available light, procedure step by step — and then pointed that camera at a possessed child in Georgetown and changed horror forever. In a three-year span he won the Academy Award for directing The French Connection and made The Exorcist, the first horror film ever nominated for Best Picture. Then he spent fifty years being reappraised: the flops became classics, the provocations became landmarks, and the man who joked that the rest of his career was an “uphill climb to the bottom” was still working at 87, with a finished film premiering a month after his death. This is the record, computed carefully — because his obituaries couldn’t even agree on how old he was. He was 87. Do the maths.
The Life
William David Friedkin was born in Chicago in 1935, son of Rae and Louis Friedkin, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine; his father was a semi-professional softball player, merchant seaman and men’s-clothing salesman. Friedkin, raised Jewish, described himself in later life as an agnostic. By his own repeated account, seeing Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane as a boy made him fascinated with movies — print that as his stated turning point, which is what it is. There was no film school: he went to work for WGN-TV straight out of high school, starting in the mailroom, and rose to directing live television and documentaries; he claimed in later years to have directed some 2,000 television programmes in that run, and the figure is his, so it travels with his name on it.
His marriages, plainly: Jeanne Moreau (1977–79), Lesley-Anne Down (1982–85), Kelly Lange (1987–90), and Sherry Lansing — the former Paramount head — from 1991 until his death. He had two sons, Cedric and Jack. He died at home in Bel Air on 7 August 2023, of heart failure and pneumonia, with his final film completed and unreleased. He was 87 years old — born 29 August 1935, dead three weeks before his 88th birthday, and every round-up that printed 88 was rounding a man’s life up. Not here.
The Work
The career starts on death row. The People vs. Paul Crump (1962), a 59-minute documentary Friedkin made as a young Chicago TV director, won the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and contributed to Governor Otto Kerner commuting Crump’s death sentence to life imprisonment — contributed to a commutation, note; it did not free him or prove him innocent, and Friedkin himself later concluded Crump was probably guilty. He moved to Hollywood, directed national documentaries for David L. Wolper, and made his feature debut with the Sonny and Cher musical Good Times (1967). The Birthday Party (1968), from Pinter — who Friedkin called a revelation as pivotal as Citizen Kane — contains the emblem of his whole method: at a scene’s climax he cuts to several seconds of blackness and silence. The Boys in the Band (1970), Mart Crowley’s play shot as a chamber piece with its original Off-Broadway cast, was a frank mainstream treatment of gay life for its moment and is now routinely described as a milestone of queer cinema.
The French Connection (1971) made him. Director only — Ernest Tidyman wrote it, from Robin Moore’s book — Friedkin shot the hunt for a French heroin smuggler through Brooklyn with a documentary method: handheld, location, grit, crowned by the car chase beneath the elevated train that remains the reference point for screen chases. State the awards exactly: the film won five Academy Awards from eight nominations — Picture, Director for Friedkin, Actor for Gene Hackman, Adapted Screenplay, Editing — and was the first R-rated film to win Best Picture. It was made on a budget the record gives as a range, $1.8–2.2 million. That is Friedkin’s Oscar win. There is one. Hold that thought.
Because The Exorcist (1973) — where he was nominated for Best Director and lost, to George Roy Hill for The Sting — is the bigger shadow. Director only again: the screenplay is William Peter Blatty’s, from Blatty’s novel, and the film’s dialogue is Blatty’s authorship, not Friedkin’s. What Friedkin authored is the treatment: a possession story filmed with documentary seriousness — Georgetown exteriors, the Iraq prologue, a slow clinical build — so the supernatural lands as fact. Ellen Burstyn is Chris MacNeil, Linda Blair is Regan, Jason Miller — a playwright with no film acting, cast over the already-hired Stacy Keach — is Father Karras, and Max von Sydow is Father Merrin. The money, in its proper measures: a $12 million budget; $193 million grossed on the original release; $441 million lifetime including reissues — never sell the lifetime figure as the 1973 take. The awards, exactly: ten nominations, two wins (Blatty’s Adapted Screenplay, and Sound), and the first horror film ever nominated for Best Picture. The sequels are not his, and this page keeps them separate: Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) was directed by John Boorman — Friedkin and Blatty had nothing to do with it — and The Exorcist III (1990) is Blatty’s own film. The franchise sprawl that followed, down to The Exorcist: Believer, is the industry proof of what the original opened — the Georgetown locations are pilgrimage sites now.
What followed the summit was the climb he joked about. Sorcerer (1977), his Wages of Fear remake, died against Star Wars and is now far more respected than on release — both halves, always. Cruising (1980), Pacino undercover in New York’s leather scene, was protested in production and reviled on release, and is now steadily reappraised. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) — William Petersen hunting Willem Dafoe‘s counterfeiter — returned to the French Connection grammar with a wrong-way freeway chase and a hero as lawless as his quarry; a modern classic now. Rampage (1987; its US release was held until 1992) and The Guardian (1990) — his supernatural folk-horror return, a druidic tree-nymph nanny, derided in its day and omitted entirely from his own memoir, which this page declines to imitate: the credit is his, and the folk-horror reappraisal is running. The nineties closed his major-studio feature run (Blue Chips, Jade, the TV 12 Angry Men), and the 2000s opened with Rules of Engagement and The Hunted.
Then the late peak the BFI obituary named: two Tracy Letts plays shot as chamber pieces. Bug (2006) — Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in one Oklahoma motel room, descending into a shared delusion of implanted insects, or something worse; the film sustains the play’s ambiguity and this page won’t resolve it either. Killer Joe (2011; US theatrical 2012) — McConaughey’s detective-hitman hired by a Texas family — was released NC-17, and Friedkin refused to cut it for an R. In 2017 he returned to his great subject in non-fiction with The Devil and Father Amorth, a documentary following the Vatican’s chief exorcist at a real case. And the final film: The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023), his modernised Wouk adaptation with Kiefer Sutherland as Queeg, which premiered at Venice on 3 September 2023 — after his death — and reached Paramount+ with Showtime that October. Because of his age, the production contractually required a designated backup director; Friedkin named Guillermo del Toro, who attended set daily in support. A backup designation is not a co-direction credit: Friedkin completed the film himself. From 1998 until his death he also worked extensively as an opera director in the US and Europe.
The Friedkin Touch
Documentary realism is the spine: the mailroom-to-live-TV-to-death-row training applied to fiction, procedure shown step by step, so that when the impossible arrives it arrives in a world you believe. Underneath sits moral reversal — the BFI, paraphrasing critic Jean-François Tarnowski, notes that in Friedkin hero and villain constantly switch places and the hero’s goodness is in question from the start. His own summary of his themes, from his interviews: “guilt, obsession, the breakdown of social order, a man’s inner conflict over his own actions.” And his memoir’s credo: “What I still want from a film – or a play, a painting, a novel, a piece of music – is exhilaration. I want to be moved and surprised at some revelation about the human condition.” Nobody’s filmography in New Hollywood is so consistently built from stage plays — Pinter, Crowley, Rose, Letts twice, Wouk — and the Birthday Party blackness-and-silence cut is the punctuation mark for all of it.
The Exorcist set lore is told by its participants and this page keeps their names on it. The shape is multi-source: Regan’s bedroom was refrigerated until the actors’ breath visibly fogged (any exact temperature you have read needs its source named — the figures in circulation vary wildly). On the production record, Friedkin slapped the Rev. William O’Malley — a real Jesuit priest playing Father Dyer — hard across the face before the last-rites take, after asking “Do you trust me?”; O’Malley’s shaking hands in the scene are the documented result. He fired blanks without warning for genuine startles — Jason Miller objected that he didn’t need the trick. Miller was told the pea-soup vomit rig would hit his chest; it hit his face, and the disgust on screen is real. Burstyn sustained a back injury in a harness gag pulled harder than agreed and spoke angrily about it for decades, in the documentary record, while also laughing about it — both registers are hers and both stay. That is the method’s cost ledger, stated as its participants stated it.
Why He Matters
For horror, The Exorcist is the hinge: the first horror film nominated for Best Picture, a blockbuster that treated possession with A-picture seriousness, adult theology and documentary realism, and made prestige horror commercially and institutionally possible. Add The Guardian‘s folk-horror thread, Bug‘s chamber of shared delusion and the Amorth documentary, and his horror work spans fifty years and every register from blockbuster to motel-room two-hander. For cinema entire: the modern police thriller and the modern car chase set in one film; three reappraised masterpieces behind the hits; a director in his seventies refusing every softening on offer. His personal Academy record, unpacked one final time: two nominations, one win — both for Best Director, the win for The French Connection. (He also won the Golden Globe for directing both films — a separate record, and Globes are not Oscars.) Few American careers run unbroken from a 1962 death-row documentary to a posthumous 2023 premiere. His did.
Trivia & Facts
- He died at 87, not 88 — born 29 August 1935, died 7 August 2023, three weeks short of his 88th birthday. Compute it; don’t copy it.
- He did not direct Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman), French Connection II (John Frankenheimer) or The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty).
- The French Connection was the first R-rated film to win Best Picture.
- Fernando Rey was cast as Charnier by confusion — Friedkin had asked for Francisco Rabal; the casting director produced Rey, and Friedkin kept him.
- The Guardian (1990) does not appear in Friedkin’s memoir at all. It is nonetheless his film.
- Killer Joe was released NC-17 because Friedkin refused to cut it for an R.
- Guillermo del Toro was the contractually designated backup director on The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial — a backup, present daily, who never had to step in. Friedkin finished the film himself.
FAQ
Did William Friedkin win an Oscar for The Exorcist?
No. He was nominated for Best Director and lost to George Roy Hill (The Sting). His Oscar win is Best Director for The French Connection. The Exorcist itself won two Oscars — Blatty’s Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound — from ten nominations, and was the first horror film ever nominated for Best Picture.
How old was William Friedkin when he died?
87. He was born 29 August 1935 and died 7 August 2023 — three weeks before his 88th birthday, which is exactly how so many outlets came to print 88.
Did Friedkin direct the Exorcist sequels?
None of them. Exorcist II: The Heretic is John Boorman’s (Friedkin and Blatty had nothing to do with it), and The Exorcist III is William Peter Blatty’s.
Did The People vs. Paul Crump free Paul Crump?
No. The documentary contributed to Governor Kerner commuting Crump’s death sentence to life imprisonment. Crump remained in prison, and Friedkin himself later concluded he was probably guilty.