Celebrity Biographies
Michael Winner
The British Michael Winner was not only the director of titles such as “The city vigilante” and two of its sequels, he also worked as a food critic, and was considered a true ‘bon vivant’. Winner has died at his London residence, at the age of 77, as a result of a brief illness, as announced by his widow. He directed legendary actors like Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando and Robert Mitchum.
Photo: michael-winner.com
Born on October 30, 1935, in Hampstead (London), Michael Robert Winner came from an upper-class Jewish family, although his mother had gambling problems and sold part of her property. From the age of 14, Michael wrote entertainment columns for various publications, and when he studied Law and Economics at Downing College, Cambridge, he edited his own student publication. With this activity he achieved interviews with great cinema legends, such as James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich .
After graduating, he began working as an assistant director for various BBC programs. He ends up shooting a short, The Square , and writes the script for Man with a Gun , which Montgomery Tully directed . He soon became a director, filming in his country titles such as The English Robbery and The Last Obstacle , with Oliver Reed , which was successful in the United States.
Consequently, he is recruited to Hollywood, where Michael Winner debuted in 1971 with In the Name of the Law , a western with Burt Lancaster and Robert Duvall . Lancaster would repeat his orders years later in Scorpio . After The Last Forbidden Games , a prequel to “A Turn of the Screw”, the story by Henry James , with Marlon Brando , directs Charles Bronson for the first time in Chato, the Apache , where the tough actor played a half-breed who killed in defense owned by a law enforcement officer. The star and the director connected to the fullest, as they soon collaborated again onColdly… without personal motives , where Bronson was a hired assassin, and in violent America , in which he played a private detective faced with a Sicilian mobster.
But the biggest success of the two was The City Justice , adapted from a Michael Garfield novel , which Winner took over when the initial director, Sidney Lumet , left the project due to scheduling problems. The story of Paul Kersey, a New York architect who takes the law into his own hands after the rape of his daughter and the murder of his wife, sparked a heated debate about the legitimacy of revenge and the limits of judicial system. Winner himself directed two sequels, I Am Justice and The Night Wish (there were two others, I Am Justice II , by J. Lee Thompson , and Death Wish V: The Face of Death, by Allan A. Goldstein ).
Winner also directed Private Detective , with Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, The Wicked Lady , with Faye Dunaway , and Appointment with Death , adapted from an Agatha Christie novel , with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. He said goodbye to the cinema in 1998 with Parting Shots , a curious comedy that at times seems to parody the Charles Bronson saga , as its protagonist is a guy who, after surviving cancer, becomes a street vigilante, fighting crime.
Winner also had time to develop a parallel career as a food critic. In his Sunday Times column, titled “Winner’s Dinners,” he blasted the worst restaurants in all of Britain with a very British wry and classy sense of humour. Last December 9 he wrote the last one, announcing his withdrawal.
Winner had been paired with Géraldine Lynton-Edwars since he started filming at 21, she was 16. They met in 1957, but he resisted proposing until they were a whopping fifty. They were finally married on September 19, 2011