Jeremy Thomas died on September 11 at the age of 77, ending a career that stretched across more than 80 screen credits and some of the most durable titles in British and international cinema. He passed away peacefully at his country home in Oxfordshire late on Friday 11th, surrounded by his family and loved ones.
His family said: "Jeremy Thomas, the celebrated British producer of The Last Emperor and of over 40 other films, has died, at the age of 77". That places his death on the final day of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, where Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard was in the main competition and Thomas was still being credited with fresh creative input.
The Last Emperor and Crash
Thomas’s list of credits runs well past a standard obituary line. He produced Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast and David Cronenberg’s Crash, a cluster that shows how often he backed directors working at the edge of commercial and critical cinema.
The Last Emperor took three years to make and won nine Oscars in 1987, while Crash world premiered in Cannes in 1996 and later became mired in a censorship battle. Those two films alone explain why his death lands beyond one national industry: he helped finance work that crossed awards voting, festival prestige and controversy in equal measure.
Recorded Picture Company and Hanway Films
Born on July 26, 1949, Thomas came from a filmmaking family and moved through several film jobs after school before becoming an editor. He was an assistant editor on The Harder They Come and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, then first assistant editor on Ken Loach’s A Family Life before shifting into producing in 1974 with Mad Dog Morgan, starring Dennis Hopper.
He founded Recorded Picture Company after that move into producing, and the company began with Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout, which won the Grand Prix de Jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978. In 1998, he founded Hanway Films with Peter Watson and Stephan Mallmann, extending the commercial side of a career that had already built enough prestige to keep his name attached to later projects.
Bucking Fastard and Joie de Vivre
Thomas was still active at the end. At a festival press conference last week, Werner Herzog credited him for coming up with the idea of casting Kate and Rooney Mara in the lead roles of two sisters who act and speak as one in Bucking Fastard. He also appeared as an interviewee in Luca Guadagnino’s seven-hour documentary Joie de Vivre.
That makes the immediate picture unusually stark: the producer’s final professional footprint was still visible in current work even as his family was arranging the statement about his death. The practical question now is whether any of the projects he touched during that late period issue further public detail, but the core fact is already fixed — Thomas is gone, and the credits that defined his reputation now stand as the record.
