Sir Alan William Parker (14 February 1944 – 31 July 2020) was an English filmmaker. His early career, beginning in his late teens, was spent as a copywriter and director of television advertisements. After about ten years of filming adverts, many of which won awards for creativity, he began screenwriting and directing films.
Parker was known for using a wide range of filmmaking styles and working in differing genres. He directed musicals, including Bugsy Malone (1976), Fame (1980), Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982), The Commitments (1991), and Evita (1996), true-story dramas, including Midnight Express (1978), Mississippi Burning (1988), Come See the Paradise (1990), and Angela's Ashes (1999), family dramas, including Shoot the Moon (1982), and horrors and thrillers including Angel Heart (1987), and The Life of David Gale (2003).
Parker's films won nineteen BAFTA awards, ten Golden Globes and six Academy Awards. His film Birdy was chosen by the National Board of Review as one of the Top Ten Films of 1984 and won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury prize at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. In 1984, Parker received the BAFTA for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema, and in 2002 he was knighted for his services to the film industry. He was active in both British cinema and American cinema, along with being a founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain and lecturing at various film schools.
In 2000, Parker received the Royal Photographic Society Lumière Award for major achievement in cinematography, video or animation. In 2013, he received the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, the highest honour the British Film Academy can give a filmmaker. Parker donated his personal archive to the British Film Institute's National Archive in 2015.
Along with Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott, and Tony Scott, Parker was part of the "Adland Five" of British directors operating in the late 1970s and early 1980s who first established themselves in the advertising world, before going on to Hollywood success. The group's influence has been cited by the likes of Christopher Nolan and Christopher Frayling.
Parker was born on 14 February 1944 into a working-class family in Islington, North London, the son of Elsie Ellen, a dressmaker, and William Leslie Parker, a house painter. He grew up on a council estate in Islington, which always made it easy for him to remain "almost defiantly working-class in attitudes" said the British novelist and screenwriter Ray Connolly. Parker said that although he had his share of fun growing up, he always felt he was studying for his secondary school exams, while his friends were out having a good time. He had an "ordinary background" with no aspirations to become a film director, nor did anyone in his family have any desire to be involved in the film industry. The closest he ever came, he said, to anything related to films was learning photography, a hobby inspired by his uncles: "...that early introduction to photography is something I remember". Parker attended Dame Alice Owen's School, concentrating on science in his last year. He left school when he was 18 to work in the advertising field, hoping that the advertising industry might be a good way to meet girls.
1962–1975: Early work and breakthrough
Parker's first job was office boy in the post room of Ogilvy & Mather an advertising agency in London. But more than anything, he said, he wanted to write, and would write essays and ads when he got home after work. His colleagues also encouraged him to write, which soon led him to a position as a copywriter in the company. Parker took jobs with different agencies over the next few years, having by then become proficient as a copywriter. One such agency was Collett Dickenson Pearce in London, where he first met the future producers David Puttnam and Alan Marshall, both of whom would later produce many of his films. Parker credited Puttnam with inspiring him and talking him into writing his first film script, Melody (1971).
By 1968, Parker had moved from copywriting to successfully directing numerous television advertisements. In 1970, he joined Marshall to establish a company to make advertisements. That company eventually became one of Britain's best commercial production houses, winning nearly every major national and international award open to it. Among their award-winning adverts were the UK Cinzano vermouth advertisement (starring Joan Collins and Leonard Rossiter), and a Heineken advert which used 100 actors. Parker credited his years writing and directing adverts for his later success as a film director: Looking back, I came from a generation of filmmakers who couldn't have really started anywhere but commercials, because we had no film industry in the United Kingdom at the time. People like Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Adrian Lyne, Hugh Hudson, and myself. So commercials proved to be incredibly important.
After writing the screenplay for the Waris Hussein film Melody in 1971, Parker shot his first fictional film titled No Hard Feelings in 1972, for which he wrote the script. The film is a bleak love story set against the Blitz in London during the Second World War, when the Luftwaffe bombed the city for 57 consecutive nights. Parker was born during one of those bombing raids, and said "the baby in that [film] could well have been me". With no feature film directing experience, he could not find financial backing, and decided to risk using his own money and funds from mortgaging his house to cover the cost. The film impressed the BBC, which bought the film and showed it on television a few years later in 1976. The BBC producer Mark Shivas had, in the interim, also contracted Parker to direct The Evacuees (1975), a Second World War story written by Jack Rosenthal which was shown as a Play for Today. The work was based on true events which involved the evacuation of school children from central Manchester. The Evacuees won a BAFTA for best TV drama and also an Emmy for best International Drama.
Parker next wrote and directed his first feature film, Bugsy Malone (1976), a parody of early American gangster films and American musicals, but with only child actors. Parker's desire in making the film was to entertain both children and adults with a unique concept and style of film:
I'd worked a lot with kids and I had four very young children of my own at the time. When you do have young children like that you're very sensitive to the kind of materials that's available for them ... The only kind of movies they could see were Walt Disney movies ... I thought it would be nice to make a movie that would be good for the kids, and also the adults that had to take them. So to be absolutely honest, Bugsy Malone was a pragmatic exercise to break into American film.
The film received eight British Academy Award nominations and five Awards, including two BAFTAs for Jodie Foster.
Parker next directed Midnight Express (1978), based on a true account by Billy Hayes about his incarceration and escape from a Turkish prison for trying to smuggle hashish out of the country. Parker made the film in order to do something radically different from Bugsy Malone, which would broaden his style of filmmaking. The script was written by Oliver Stone in his first screenplay, and won Stone his first Academy Award. The music was composed by Giorgio Moroder, who was also awarded his first Oscar for the film. Midnight Express established Parker as a "front rank director", as both he and the film were Oscar nominated. The success of that film also gave him the freedom from then on to direct films of his own choosing.
Parker then directed Fame (1980), which follows the lives of eight students through their years at the New York City's High School of Performing Arts. It was a huge box-office success and led to a television spin-off series of the same name. Parker stated that after doing a serious drama like Midnight Express, he wanted to do a film with music, but very different from typical musicals of the past. Having already done Bugsy Malone, he felt confident that he knew how to go about creating a musical where the songs emerge from real situations.