Peter O Toole in Richard Rush s The Stunt Man
Credit: 20th Century Fox
The passing of Richard Rush, the writer-director who died last week aged 91, strikes me as the epitaph to something – a certain era of risk-taking in American cinema. His career is one of Hollywood’s great might-have-beens. According to Variety, he gave away the rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and turned down Jaws. In the last 40 years, he was only responsible for one film, and that was his worst – the dilapidated Bruce Willis erotic thriller Color of Night (1994), about which the less said the better.
Richard Rush
He also helmed three films featuring a young Jack Nicholson as well as one of the first buddy-cop movies, Freebie and the Bean.
Richard Rush, the writer, director and producer who earned two Oscar nominations for his work on the deliciously dark Peter O Toole comedy
The Stunt Man, has died. He was 91.
Rush died Thursday of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles, his wife, Claude, told
The Hollywood Reporter. He demonstrated an incredible will to live and survived 18 years with a heart transplant, she noted.
Early in his career, Rush directed the youth-targeted flicks
Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) and
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