Celebrity Biographies
Richard Rush
He achieved two Oscar nominations, as a writer and director of “The Specialist”, from 1980. Richard Rush died on April 8, 2021, at the age of 91, at his residence in Los Angeles, according to Claude, his wife. “He demonstrated an incredible ‘will to live’ and survived 18 years with a heart transplant,” he added.
Born on April 15, 1929, in Manhattan, Richard Rush was a huge fan of comics growing up. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was still a kid. He became one of the first film graduates from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After serving in the army, where he was in the film department, he opens his own production company. He debuted as a director with Too Young for Love, followed by Hell’s Angels on Wheels and Passport to Madness , all three with a very young Jack Nicholson .
It took him almost a decade to pull off The Specialist (1980) , although the Academy rewarded him with two Oscar nominations. Peter O’Toole plays Eli Cross, a manipulative film director who hides a fugitive, who pretends to be a stuntman on the film he is shooting. Despite praise from critics and effusive praise from viewers who saw it, it was not very successful, mainly because it was not very well treated by the distributor.
“The real reason it took so long to greenlight it is that they wanted a movie that could be described in one sentence,” Richard Rush recalled in an interview . “Was it a comedy, a tragedy, a social satire or an action-adventure movie? The answer was ‘yes, it’s a mix of everything,’ and they couldn’t pigeonhole it. I refused to change anything, and ten years later, when we made the movie, it came out exactly the way I wanted it to.”
As a result of the film’s failure, Richard Rush did not shoot for more than a decade, until he returned with The Color of Night , an irregular erotic thriller starring Bruce Willis and Jane March . It was his last job.