In memoriam: Mark Damon (Telegraph 18/05/24)

Mark Damon, who has died aged 91, enjoyed two bites at the Hollywood cherry, first as a toothy B-movie performer, then as a financier and producer of several worldwide hits, including Das Boot (1981) and The Lost Boys (1987). His company Producers Sales Organization rethought the way films were sold internationally, initiating the now-standard practice of pre-selling titles to foreign distributors based on creative personnel and advance publicity materials. The tactic – securing funds often before a single frame of film had been shot – proved a game-changing success; in 1983, PSO did more overseas business than any of the major American studios. 

As an actor, Damon was one of the many stolidly pretty figures underwriting the post-War studio system. Signed to Fox in 1958, he often “played handsome leads in inconsequential films”, as the biographer Ephraim Katz summarised. Yet he found more notable work outside his contract, winning the Golden Globe for Best Male Newcomer as Philip Winthrop in Roger Corman’s Poe adaptation The Fall of the House of Usher (1960). 

Upon moving to Italy in 1962, Damon – and his cerulean eyes, newly piercing in gaudy Eastmancolor – became a fixture of the emergent spaghetti Western genre. An agent blocked him from appearing in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), but he headlined Sergio Corbucci’s Ringo and His Golden Pistol (1966) and made an especially dastardly villain in Requiescant (1967). 

“I was surprised, because I had never ridden a horse in my life,” Damon later told an interviewer. “Cowboys had to be tall and blond, and I’m not that tall. I had very dark hair at the time, but they said, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re American.’ I said OK and learned to ride a horse.” 

Yet Damon grew tired of typecasting, taking a job with an Italian distributor – “they really wanted me because they thought I knew everyone in Hollywood and could get them bigger pictures” – before returning to the US with a greater understanding of the hardscrabble involved in making low-budget pictures. 

His producing career began with the Pam Grier vehicle The Arena (1974), which bore the semi-irresistible tagline “See Wild Women Fight to The Death”. The rights for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) eluded him, but he assumed mogul status soon thereafter: Das Boot (1981) netted six Oscar nominations, while its director Wolfgang Petersen’s well-packaged follow-up, The NeverEnding Story (1984), yielded big box-office and a top ten pop hit.

Juggling such family fare with altogether more adult material, including 9½ Weeks (1986), Damon grasped what his legacy would be: “My claim to fame will be the fact that I basically […] became what they call the godfather of independent films… How did somebody do what I did? Because I didn’t know better. I came in with such a fresh viewpoint because I’d been an actor and didn’t know anything.” 

Damon was born Alan Harris on April 22, 1933 in Chicago, where his parents were grocers. A keen actor from his schooldays, he studied dentistry at UCLA – briefly rooming with Jack Nicholson – before switching courses, eventually emerging with a literature BA and an MA in business administration. He made his screen debut in a 1952 episode of true-crime compendium Gang Busters, and his feature debut in the union drama Inside Detroit (1956).

Much like Corman, whom he outlived by three days, he was both prolific and catholic in his tastes, negotiating deals for Zalman King’s Red Shoe Diaries (1992), the WW2 epic Stalingrad (1993) and Disney’s first live-action take on The Jungle Book (1995). Few projects achieved critical glory, although Monster (2003) landed Charlize Theron an Oscar for playing the serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

He worked well into his eighties, producing the Nicolas Cage actioner Willy’s Wonderland (2021), while his 2008 memoir From Cowboy to Mogul to Monster: The Neverending Story of Film Pioneer Mark Damon became a touchstone for independently minded creatives. Flexibility, he admitted, had been key to his success: “If you don’t succeed in the field of your dreams, you may one day succeed in the field you never dreamed of. That’s the story of my career.”

He is survived by his second wife, the actress Margaret Markov, and their two children; he was previously married to the actress Barbara Frey.

Mark Damon, born April 22, 1933, died May 12, 2024.