Celebrity

Cher, Barbra Streisand, and more react to the death of Peter Bogdanovich

Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Guillermo del Toro were among the directors paying tribute to the legendary filmmaker.

By

Lester Fabian Brathwaite

Published on January 6, 2022 07:54PM EST

Collaborators, friends, and admirers alike are reacting to the death of legendary director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich, who died early Thursday morning at age 82.

Cybill Shepherd, who was involved in a relationship with Bogdanovich from 1971 to 1978, recalled working on her first film with him, calling the experience "a blessing."

"Having Peter Bogdonavich as my first acting teacher in my first film, The Last Picture Show, was a blessing of enormous proportion," Shepherd said in a statement. "There are simply no words to express my feelings over this deepest of losses. May Peter live long in all our memories."

Tatum O'Neal won an Academy Award in 1974, becoming the youngest person ever to win a competitive Oscar, for her role in Paper Moon. In a series of posts to Instagram, she called Bogdanovich her "heaven and earth" and "a father figure."

Barbra Streisand starred in Bogdanovich's acclaimed homage to screwball comedy What's Up, Doc? said on Twitter that "Peter always made me laugh! He'll keep making them laugh up there too. May he Rest in Peace."

Another of the director's leading ladies, Cher, with whom he shared a very fraught relationship while (and after) making 1985's Mask, chose to remember him more kindly.

"Just heard Peter has died. I'm proud of the film (Mask) we made together and in the end I'm sure he must have been as well," the diva tweeted. "He made some very memorable films and discovered amazingly talented artists."

Director Francis Ford Coppola, in an email statement, highlighted the unforgettable reaction to the premiere of The Last Picture Show.

"Oh dear, a shock. I am devastated. He was a wonderful and great artist. I'll never forgot attending a premiere for The Last Picture Show. I remember at its end, the audience leaped up all around me bursting into applause lasting easily 15 minutes. I'll never forget although I felt I had never myself experienced a reaction like that, that Peter and his film deserved it. May he sleep in bliss for eternity, enjoying the thrill of our applause forever."

Fellow director and film historian Martin Scorsese honored Bogdanovich via an email statement, gave a true movie lover's dedication to his old friend, focusing on his fight for "the art of cinema and the people who created it."

"In the '60s, at a crucial moment in the history of the movie business and the art of cinema, Peter Bogdanovich was right there at the crossroads of the Old Hollywood and the New. Curator, critic, historian, actor, director, popular entertainer...Peter did it all. As a programmer here in New York, he put together essential retrospectives of then still overlooked masters from the glory days of the studio system; as a journalist, he got to know almost everybody, from John Ford and Howard Hawks to Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant. Like many of us, he made his way into directing pictures by way of Roger Corman, and he and Francis Coppola broke into the system early on: Peter's debut, Targets, is still one of his very best films. With The Last Picture Show, he made a movie that seemed to look backward and forward at the same time as well as a phenomenal success, followed quickly by What's Up Doc? and Paper Moon. In the years that followed, Peter had setbacks and tragedies, and he just kept going on, constantly reinventing himself. The last time I saw Peter was in 2018 at The New York Film Festival, where we appeared together on a panel discussion of his old friend Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind (in which Peter gives a great performance, and to which he dedicated a lot of time and energy throughout many years). Right up to the end, he was fighting for the art of cinema and the people who created it."

Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, who worked with Bogdanovich on a podcast about his life in 2020, The Plot Thickens, said the late filmmaker was "easy to love."

The American Film Institute and the Criterion Collection both tweeted out their own tributes:

As did directors Guillermo del Toro, James Gunn, and Paul Feig:

And Ben Stiller recommended everyone check out Paper Moon:

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