Henry Jaglom, who has died aged 87, was an actor-turned-filmmaker who became a snappily dressed mainstay of the American independent scene. Though he generated few hits, his talky, testy, largely improvised pictures – notably the arresting Tracks (1976) and Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983) – demonstrated an idiosyncratic creativity that bore the influence of his friend and mentor Orson Welles.
Jaglom first emerged amid the free-ranging New Hollywood of the 1970s; alongside fellow traveller Jack Nicholson, he’d helped edit Dennis Hopper’s landmark Easy Rider (1969). “The possibility opened up that you could really do serious and interesting work and survive commercially,” he later told the author Peter Biskind. “We wanted to have film reflect our lives.”
His directorial debut A Safe Place (1971), starring Tuesday Weld as a dreamer falling under Nicholson’s spell, was far beyond the ken of the old studio system, not least as Nicholson agreed to participate in return for a new colour television set. Village Voice called the results “experimental, audacious, demanding, arrogant and vulnerable”; at the New York Film Festival, the film sparked shouting matches. (One fan was Anaïs Nin, who called it a masterpiece.)
Shot without permits on the Amtrak network – a process that saw director and star being sporadically ejected mid-shoot – Tracks cast Hopper as a Vietnam vet transporting a fallen comrade’s coffin across America. The comedy Sitting Ducks (1980) proved a surprise arthouse success; while critic David Thomson dubbed Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, a lonely-hearts romance featuring Welles, Karen Black and a young Larry David, “a new kind of film”.
Jaglom’s subsequent, semi-autobiographical features often burrowed down into moments of transition. Always (1985) dramatised the end of his first marriage to Patrice Townsend; Someone to Love (1987) proved Welles’ cinematic swansong; the romance Déjà Vu (1997), starring Jaglom’s second wife Victoria Foyt, marked the only time Vanessa Redgrave appeared on screen with her mother Rachel Kempson. “I don’t direct,” Jaglom insisted. “I take away. I extract. Orson said I was like an old Eskimo carving away at a walrus tusk, trying to find what’s inside.”
Henry David Jaglom was born in London on January 26, 1938 to Simon M. Jaglom, a Ukrainian Jew who ran an export business in Danzig, and his German wife Marie (née Stadthagen). The family fled Europe after the Nazis offered Simon honorary Aryan status (“he realised when they want to make you an honorary of what you’re not, it's time to leave”); they settled in Manhattan, where Henry attended Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School.
After studying English at the University of Pennsylvania, Jaglom rejected his father’s pleas to follow him into business, instead taking an allowance to study at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio; later, he wrote and directed off-Broadway, debuting on TV in the CBS social drama East Side/West Side (1963). He relocated to L.A. in 1965, appearing in several key New Hollywood texts – including the Nicholson-directed Drive, He Said (1971) – before making A Safe Place.
In the new millennium, Jaglom puzzled away at an industry he’d been increasingly forced to observe from the margins, yielding such curios as Festival in Cannes (2001), starring Anouk Aimée, and Hollywood Dreams (2006) and Queen of the Lot (2010), showcases for his third wife Tanna Frederick.
Though these dogged endeavours were true to a filmmaking ethos conceived decades earlier, the money was drying up and critical enthusiasm waning, while the distribution models had changed beyond recognition. Jaglom’s final film Train to Zakopané (2017) – a black-and-white period piece, inspired by his father’s stories of an anti-Semitic travelling companion – premiered at L.A.’s Jewish Film Festival, then practically disappeared.
Drawing altogether more column inches were Jaglom’s gossipy conversations with Welles, transcribed for Biskind’s 2013 book My Lunches with Orson, and Netflix’s reconstruction of Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind (2018), in which Jaglom cameoed as himself. His final screen appearance will be in the indie Everyone Asked About You (2025), released to streaming this October.
Jaglom wed three times; his marriages to Townsend and Foyt ended in divorce, while his marriage to Frederick was annulled in 2019. Speaking last year to the author Mary Tabor about Always and the end of his first marriage, Jaglom recalled: “I was crying and on the floor and I was desolate. And [Orson] said to me, ‘Look, if you were a songwriter, you’d be writing songs about this. If you were a poet, you’d be writing poems. You’re a filmmaker, make a film about it.’”
He is survived by his two children with Foyt, Sabrina and Simon O. Jaglom.
Henry Jaglom, born January 26, 1938, died September 22, 2025.
