Peploe came highly recommended from an Italian filmmaker of an earlier stripe: Michelangelo Antonioni, who’d enlisted Peploe to write The Passenger (1975), his tale of a jaded journalist (Jack Nicholson) who co-opts a dead arms dealer’s identity. That project had its roots in two earlier Peploe assignments: the short story Fatal Exit, and his screenplay for Technically Sweet, an Amazon-set riff on Italo Calvino’s L'avventura di un fotografo that Antonioni intended to direct before mounting costs got producer Carlo Ponti nervous.
With the film theorist Peter Wollen, Antonioni and Peploe radically reworked the thematic core of these projects, planting one foot firmly in the bloody realities of the Chadian Civil War even as they pushed onwards towards rigorous philosophical investigation. “Who we are is the central issue – and it turns out nobody knows who anyone is,” Peploe told Time Out upon the film’s release. “[Nicholson’s protagonist] David Locke wants to change, wants to care, but he doesn’t even know who he is trying to become.”
Although Antonioni was frustrated by studio cuts, the finished film hooked viewers searching for meaning amid the moral miasma of the Watergate years; critic Andrew Sarris proposed “it may turn out to be the definitive spiritual testament of our times”. Yet after inheriting the rights from MGM upon winning an unrelated legal dispute, Nicholson withheld The Passenger from distribution until the mid-2000s. Upon its 2006 reissue, Peter Bradshaw called it “a classic of a difficult and alienating kind, but one that really does shimmer in the mind like a remembered dream.”
By that point, Peploe was an Oscar winner for The Last Emperor, Bertolucci’s biopic of the Qing emperor Puyi, and a singular story from the off. Crowned in 1908 aged just three, Puyi was exiled after 1924’s Beijing Coup and appointed by Japan as puppet emperor of Manchuria during WW2; he later worked as a gardener in Peking’s Botanical Gardens. The challenges here were twofold: to combine epic sweep with telling interpersonal and psychological detail, and to get the script past the Chinese censors so as to access filming locations within the Forbidden City.
In the press book, producer Jeremy Thomas recalled how Bertolucci and Peploe’s judicious handiwork made negotiating with the Chinese authorities surprisingly easy: “It was less difficult than working with the Western studio system. [The censors] only made minor script notes and references to change some of the names, then the official stamps went on and the door opened, and we came in and set to work.”
The results achieved a rare mix of scale and substance: David Thomson called The Last Emperor “a true epic but with an alertness to feelings as small and humble as a grasshopper”. It won four Golden Globes (including Best Motion Picture – Drama) and three BAFTAs (including Best Film) before scooping nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Collecting his Best Adapted Screenplay gong, Peploe joked: “It’s a great honour and hugely encouraging to anybody else who wants to write impossible movies.”
Mark Peploe was born February 24, 1943 in Nairobi, one of three children to gallerist Willy Peploe, son of the Scottish colourist Samuel Peploe, and his painter wife Clotilde (née Brewster). Relocated first to Florence, later to Belgravia, the siblings’ upbringing was decidedly classical: Clotilde, the daughter of the painter Elisabeth von Hildebrand, insisted on having no art in the house that postdated Proust. Clare Peploe maintained she and her brother gravitated to film because “it was one medium which they [her parents] knew nothing about”.
Mark attended Downside School in Somerset, before accepting a place at Magdalen College to study politics, philosophy and economics. Upon graduation, he joined Allan King Associates as a researcher, working on films for the BBC’s Creative Persons (1968), although he grew frustrated with the documentary form: “I thought that if you wrote the script, you would be able to control the movie more than I did.”
He earned his first writing credit alongside Andrew Birkin on Jacques Demy’s atypically realist adaptation of The Pied Piper (1972), featuring singer Donovan in the title role; he was also a co-writer on the French veteran René Clément’s final film La Babysitter (1975). Neither was a great success, but Peploe soon began directing his own work, earning a BAFTA nomination for his 1985 short Samson and Delilah, adapted (with the poet Frederick Siedel) from D.H. Lawrence.
There were still writing gigs, including penning his sister’s Rhodes-set artworld romp High Season (1987). Yet nothing quite matched The Last Emperor’s impact. Of The Sheltering Sky, Roger Ebert sighed “I was left with the impression of my fingers closing on air.” (Despite cameoing in the film, Bowles dismissed it, saying “the ending is idiotic and the rest is pretty bad”.) The critics were tougher still on Little Buddha, circling around the casting of a kohl-eyed Keanu Reeves, though it fared better commercially.
Peploe’s feature directorial debut was Afraid of the Dark (1991), an offbeam horror item about an eleven-year-old voyeur (Ben Keyworth) peeping out at an adult world beset by a razor-wielding killer; metabolising Hitchcock and Michael Powell, it featured a memorably nasty scene involving a dog and a knitting needle. Yet his textured Joseph Conrad adaptation Victory (1996), starring Willem Dafoe and Irène Jacob, ran into distribution issues, prompting Time Out’s Trevor Johnston to ask: “What’s so terrible about it that it was consigned to three years on the shelf?”
In the new millennium, Peploe served as a script consultant on his sister’s lively Marivaux riff The Triumph of Love (2001) and a mentor for the Guided Light scheme. Certain scripts remained unfilmed, notably Heaven and Hell, a Bertolucci passion project on the murderous composer Carlo Gesualdo, and action-thriller The Crew, from an Antonioni story. Peploe continued to tour the globe, though now as a guest of international film festivals. Asked at the 2008 Estoril event where he sourced his best ideas, Peploe ventured: “In cafes, watching the world go by.”
He is survived by his partner, the art historian Alina Payne, and a daughter, the actress and filmmaker Lola Peploe, from an earlier marriage to the costume designer Louise Stjernsward.
Mark Peploe, screenwriter and director, born February 24, 1943, died June 18, 2025.
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