John Guillermin, the British director whose expertise with big-budget action fare in the 1960s and 70s led him to direct the 1976 remake of King Kong and the 1974 disaster movie epic The Towering Inferno, has died. He was 89.
Known as a perfectionist, sometimes irascible and temperamental film-maker who was replaced on both the 1976 Charlton Heston second world war Pacific drama Battle of Midway and the 1983 Brooke Shields adventure drama Sahara, Guillermin worked with Hollywood stars such as John Mills (I Was Monty’s Double, 1958), Peter Sellers (Never Let Go, 1960, and Waltz of the Toreadors, 1962), Richard Attenborough (Guns at Batasi, 1964) and George Peppard (war movie The Blue Max, 1966).
The Cambridge graduate directed a dozen British films before he was 35, beginning with the 1949 comedy High Jinks in Society. His career as a Hollywood director stretched from 1958 film noir The Whole Truth, which starred Max Poulton as a movie producer framed for the murder of his promiscuous leading lady, to the 1986 fantasy sequel King Kong Lives, a critical and box-office turkey that led to the film-maker moving into television films.
Other well-known movies on Guillermin’s CV include the 1978 Agatha Christie whodunnit Death on the Nile, starring Peter Ustinov, Mia Farrow, Bette Davis, Maggie Smith, David Niven and Angela Lansbury, and the 1973 blaxploitation sequel Shaft in Africa, with Richard Roundtree reprising his role as the ladykilling New York detective – this time inexplicably transferred to west Africa, where he is charged with breaking up a human trafficking and slavery ring.
The British film-maker is also known for directing two Tarzan movies, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, 1959, featuring Gordon Scott, and Tarzan Goes to India, 1962, with Jock Mahoney taking over as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s king of the jungle.
A second-world-war pilot, Guillermin was married to the actor and author Maureen Connell for 40 years before the couple divorced. The film-maker died in Topanga, California, on 27 September. He is survived by his wife of 16 years, Mary, his daughter Michelle and granddaughter Greer.
