Oscar-winning director William Friedkin dies aged 87

The Exorcist director William Friedkin has died aged 87

William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director behind The French Connection and The Exorcist, has died aged 87.

Friedkin died on Monday in Los Angeles.

Winning the best director Oscar for The French Connection, the film also won Academy Awards for best picture, screenplay and film editing and led critics to hail Friedkin, then just 32, as a leading member of a new generation of filmmakers.

He followed with an even bigger blockbuster, The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel about a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil.

It was so scary for its era that many viewers fled the cinema before it was over and some reported being unable to sleep for days afterward.

The Exorcist received 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Friedkin as director, and won two, for script and for sound.

With that second success, Friedkin would go on to direct movies and TV shows well into the 21st century, but he would never again come close to matching the success of those early works.

Other film credits included To Live and Die in L.A., Cruising, Rules of Engagement and a TV remake of the classic play and Sidney Lumet movie 12 Angry Men.

Friedkin also directed episodes for such TV shows as The Twilight Zone, Rebel Highway and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Born in Chicago in 1939, he began working in local TV productions as a teenager and by 16-years-old was directing live shows.

"My main influence was dramatic radio when I was a kid," he said in a 2001 interview.

"I remember listening to it in the dark, Everything was left to the imagination. It was just sound. I think of the sounds first and then the images."

In recent years, Friedkin was often called on to reflect on his career around the 50th anniversaries of his classics and was always candid.

Thinking back to the iconic car chase sequence in The French Connection, Friedkin told NBC News in 2021 that it was legitimately life-threatening and that he'd never do it again.

"Everything you see, we actually did. There was no CGI then. There was no way to fake it. I just put the pedal to the metal, and we went 90 miles an hour in city traffic," he said.

"The fact that nobody got hurt is a miracle. The fact that I didn’t get killed, the fact that some of the crew members didn’t get hurt or killed. That’s a chance I would never take again. I was young and I didn’t give a damn. I just went out and did it. I set out to make a great chase scene and I didn’t care about the consequences, and now I do."

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