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The director of House of Cards and Fifty Shades of Grey, James Foley, passed away on May 6 at the age of 71. His representative confirmed his death to the Hollywood Reporter on May 10, saying that he passed away "peacefully in his sleep" early this week.
The spokesperson further added that after battling brain cancer for years, he passed away at his Los Angeles home. Some of Foley's most well-known films and television shows include the 1992 film adaptation of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross.
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As per the same source, a chance encounter in his last year of film school altered his life's trajectory and launched his career in filmmaking. The outlet further stated that talking about the same in an interview with Film Freak Central, Foley said:
“I was very lucky, and in the perverse calculus of Hollywood I was in the last year of film school and shared a house with a guy. There was a woman who was pursuing my friend so we had this film school party, which consisted of people projecting their student films onto a white wall and getting stoned.”
Exploring James Foley’s career as the director died of brain cancer at the age of 71
The Brooklyn-born director James Foley has recently died. Over his more than three decades in film, television, and music videos, he worked with A-list celebrities like Madonna, Mark Wahlberg, Sean Penn, and Al Pacino.
From Madonna music videos to commercial multiplex thrillers, talky TV dramas, and romances, his work was characterised by its diversity. James Foley attended New York University and then USC in Los Angeles to study film after graduating from high school.
In 1984, he directed his first film, the romantic drama Reckless, starring Daryl Hannah and Aidan Quinn. Screenwriter Chris Columbus was incensed by the film's poor reviews and renounced it, making it a contentious beginning of his big-screen career.
According to the same Hollywood Reporter story, Foley acknowledged that he believed it was all a dream. However, Ashby had already produced two films by the time he wrote a script draft, and both of them "bombed terribly," costing Foley the chance. Stating the same, James Foley said to the outlet:
“But at that time, because Hal Ashby had hired me, I became known to other people in Hollywood and got kind of viable in that weird calculus of Hollywood just because someone else, respected, thought I was viable.”
His follow-up, the murder drama At Close Range, starring Christopher Walken and Sean Penn, garnered him wider popularity. He also began working with Madonna, who was then Penn's wife, that same year.
In addition to the 1987 screwball comedy Who's That Girl, in which the singer co-starred with Griffin Dunne, he directed the music videos for Live to Tell, Papa Don't Preach, and True Blue.
Additionally, before films like the John Grisham drama The Chamber, and the Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon thriller Fear, James Foley directed one episode of Twin Peaks in the 1990s.
He also directed Perfect Stranger with Halle Berry and Confidence with Dustin Hoffman in the 2000s. In the 2010s, he directed episodes of House of Cards and Billions and worked on the two Fifty Shades of Grey sequels.
In an interview with IGN in 2003, Foley spoke humbly about his career and said:
“Seriously, if you cast the right friggin’ people and they’re good actors, it’s amazing how little you have to do but stay out of the way.”
During the same interview, further discussing his filmmaking career, he said:
"I'm always trying to learn from each movie.. And the most learning I get is right now, talking about it when I'm kind of forced to reflect on something. I realize that I've come to respect the idea of directing actors and making the whole movie, to have it be more and more driven by my unconscious and my viscera rather than my brain…”
Meanwhile, following James Foley’s death, his family members haven’t issued any statement as of yet.
