Henry Jaglom, the maverick film-maker best known for a string of low-budget, fiercely independent dramas made over more than 50 years as well as his friendship with Orson Welles, has died aged 87. His daughter Sabrina Jaglom told Deadline: “My father passed at home on Monday with my brother Simon and I and [former wife] Victoria Foyt by his side.” In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter she added: “My dad was the most loving, fun, entertaining and unique father and the biggest cheerleader and champion anyone could be lucky enough to have.”
Born in London in 1938 to a Jewish family forced to leave Germany earlier in the decade, Jaglom relocated to the US with his family and grew up in New York. Originally embarking on a career as an actor, he studied at the Actors Studio and became a contract player for Columbia Pictures, winning small roles in films such as Psych Out, Drive, He Said and The Last Movie, and TV shows such as Gidget and The Flying Nun.
However he swiftly found his metier as a director in the cinema counterculture of the time, making his debut in 1971 with the offbeat fable A Safe Place, starring Tuesday Weld and Jack Nicholson, in which Welles appeared as a magician. Its 1976 follow-up, Tracks, starring Dennis Hopper as a Vietnam veteran, was one of the first American films to deal with the psychological fallout from the conflict. Sitting Ducks, released in 1980, was the closest Jaglom came to a mainstream success, with the comic road movie starring Zack Norman, Jaglom’s brother Michael Emil and Jaglom’s wife Patrice Townsend.
Jaglom remained resolutely independent, financing his subsequent movies outside the Hollywood system and mining his own life and family for material. He became known for his actor-centred style, with plots often revolving around film-makers or performers airing their views on life and art. Regularly turning out films every two or three years over the next four decades, Jaglom was a fixture at international film festivals; high points include his 1995 film Last Summer in the Hamptons, in which an artistic family gather at the house they are shortly to sell; Deja Vu, a 1997 romance starring Stephen Dillane and Vanessa Redgrave; and Festival in Cannes, in 2001, about a film-makers trying to raise money at the celebrated French event.
In his later work, Jaglom investigated his Jewish heritage, in films such as Just 45 Minutes from Broadway in 2012, which was based on his own play about Yiddish theatre, and his final film in 2017, Train to Zakopané, again based on his own play, about the relationship between a Russian Jewish businessman and a Polish nurse.
Commercial success as a film-maker largely eluded Jaglom, but his friendship with Welles resulted in what remains his most widely known contribution to popular culture. Jaglom had taped a series of conversations with Welles over lunch in the early 1980s, which the latter had planned to use for an autobiography; after Welles’s death in 1985 the tapes were in storage until their rediscovery and publication in 2013 as My Lunches With Orson.
Jaglom was married twice, to Patrice Townsend (between 1979 and 1983) and Victoria Foyt (between 1991 and 2013), both of whom worked on a number of his films.