BLAKE EDWARDS:BLAKE EDWARDS, who has died aged 88, was a prolific film-maker who kept alive the tradition of slapstick comedy in his Pink Panther franchise and nimbly showcased his dramatic range with Breakfast at Tiffany's and Days of Wine and Roses.
In a six-decade career that rejected easy categorisation, he received an honorary Academy Award in 2004 for “writing, directing and producing an extraordinary body of work.”
Some of his best known films included the sophisticated romance Breakfast at Tiffany's(1961) with Audrey Hepburn, the bleak story of a couple in an alcoholic spiral in Days of Wine and Roses(1962) starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, and the taut manhunt story Experiment in Terror(1962) with Remick and Glenn Ford.
There also was 10 (1979), featuring Dudley Moore as a pop composer going through male menopause and Bo Derek as the object of his fantasies; S.O.B. (1981), a scathing portrait of Hollywood personalities; and Victor/Victoria(1982), a cross-dressing farce starring Edwards's real-life wife, Julie Andrews.
The non-competitive Oscar was more a tribute to his craftsmanship, versatility and endurance as a filmmaker than consistent appreciation by audiences and reviewers.
Edwards, the grandson of a silent-film director, developed an audacious and risque comic style as a producer, director and writer that was rooted in the pratfalls, sight gags and otherwise preposterous sensibilities of pre-sound movie comedy.
Yet even in his most exuberant fare, Edwards was often drawn to material that led him to explore the anxieties of love, marriage, work and sexual stereotypes. In the first of the Pink Panther outings, a detective is on the trail of a jewel thief who is cuckolding him.
The Panther series, which began in 1964 with The Pink Pantherand A Shot in the Dark, brought Edwards his most devoted following. The film's inspired lunacy owed a great deal to actor Peter Sellers, who played the unbearably snobbish, pompous and incompetent French police inspector Jacques Clouseau.
"We decided to try to make Clouseau a real clumsy, accident-prone, well-intentioned, but idiotic character," Sellers said, according to Sam Wasson's admiring study of Edwards's films, A Splurch in the Kisser.
"We decided that the one thing about Clouseau that could make him succeed was that he embodied what I considered to be the 11th commandment, which is ' Thou Shalt Not Give Up.' He never figured he could lose, never figured that he could fail."
In all, Edwards wrote and directed seven of the Pink Panther films – five of which starred Sellers until his death in 1980. Their relationship was tense. “Peter Sellers was literally bi-polar, a raging schizophrenic,” Edwards told author Franz Lidz.
After Sellers's death, Edwards directed Trail of the Pink Panther(1982), which featured out-takes from the earlier movies, and Son of the Pink Panther(1993) with Italian comic actor Roberto Benigni as Jacques Clouseau Jr.
Blake Edwards was born William Blake Crump in Tulsa in 1922. His father abandoned the family, and he was shuttled around among relatives until he joined his mother and new stepfather in Los Angeles. His stepfather’s father, J Gordon Edwards, directed several films in the 1910s starring the silent-screen vamp Theda Bara.
While in high school, Edwards began working on film lots as a script courier, and his husky, all-American good looks won acting parts onscreen. He served in the coast guard during the second World War and had a rare leading role in the low-budget thriller Strangler of the Swamp(1946).
He began writing radio scripts and screenplays on the side, leading to a partnership with film director Richard Quine. Edwards gained confidence as a director on two vehicles for pop singer Frankie Laine before moving on to bigger-budget productions. He directed Cary Grant and Tony Curtis in the wartime comedy Operation Petticoat(1959). Maurice Richlin, a co-writer on Operation Petticoat, developed the idea for the Pink Panther films.
He reached a creative and popular peak over the next several years, both on television and film. He produced the stylish detective TV series Peter Gunn(1958) starring Craig Stevens and whose jazzy theme song by Henry Mancini became a pop hit.
As the 1960s went on, Edwards's commercial viability seemed increasingly to depend on whether he directed a Pink Panther movie. His other films had little impact with critics or on the box office, including the comedy The Party(1968) with Sellers as a hapless Indian actor in Hollywood who destroys almost everything he touches.
After confrontations with studio bosses, Edwards lost control over the editing of his movies. Humiliated and angry, he and his wife went into self-imposed exile in Gstaad, Switzerland.
Then as swiftly as his career had earlier tanked, he returned to popular and critical acclaim in 1979 with 10. He followed with S.O.B., an acid farce based in large part of his own experiences.
His first marriage, to actress Patricia Walker, ended in divorce. Besides Andrews, whom he married in 1969, survivors include two children from his first marriage, Geoffrey Edwards and actress Jennifer Edwards; two Vietnamese orphans he adopted with Andrews, Amelia Edwards and Joanne Edwards; and a stepdaughter with Andrews, Emma Walton.
Despite Edwards's public reputation as a comedy master, he suffered at times from severe depression and chronic fatigue syndrome. A longtime patient of psychoanalysis, he wrote two film scripts with his therapist, including That's Life!, and made other films that explored the male psyche and sexual roles in society ( Skin Deepand Switch).
When he received his honorary Oscar, he saluted “friends and foes alike . . . I couldn’t have done it without the foes.”
Blake Edwards: born: July 26th, 1922; died December 15th, 2010