Jeremy Thomas, who has died aged 77, was an independent British film producer whose cosmopolitan tastes, keen instincts and vast industry nous enabled prominent world cinema directors to make some of the most demanding features of their entire careers. He won a Best Picture Oscar for Bernardo Bertolucci’s China-shot The Last Emperor (1987), a project that proved as much logistical feat as artistic vision; he also steadied David Cronenberg during the controversies around Crash (1996) and backed Jonathan Glazer’s debut feature Sexy Beast (2000).
From the off, he relished a challenge. His Recorded Picture Company ventured into production with Mad Dog Morgan (1976), a latter-day Western shot in the Outback with the hard-drinking Dennis Hopper in the lead. “A lot of the people who worked on the film were complete amateurs,” Thomas later recalled. “We ended up getting a $500,000 contract for a film that cost $400,000. It was a fantastic deal but then we didn’t get the money so it was poetic. But it was very good learning.”
Thomas subsequently fell in with equally questing filmmakers. He enjoyed early festival success with the Pole Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (1978), which won the Cannes Grand Prix, while developing a rewarding creative partnership with Nic Roeg, for whom he produced Bad Timing (1980), Eureka (1983) and Insignificance (1985): “I had a ten-year lesson from him about everything,” Thomas reflected, insisting Roeg stood among the greatest directors he’d worked with.
Other candidates presented. While promoting The Shout, Thomas had been introduced to the Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima, whose In the Realm of the Senses (1976) had been a global sensation. Neither could speak the other’s language, but they bonded over cinema, and the result was Thomas’s first commercial hit, the POW camp drama Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), shot on the Polynesian island of Rarotonga, with musicians Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie in the leads.
After these cultish successes, The Last Emperor proved colossal: arguably the 20th century’s last true movie epic, it required 19,000 extras, a $25m budget and continual, complex behind-the-scenes negotiation. Exploiting a brief window in East-West relations, Bertolucci’s magnum opus became the first Western production shot in China since 1949, and the first feature shot inside the Forbidden City. The leeway was such that Queen Elizabeth II, then on a state visit to Beijing, was denied entry to the Forbidden City while Bertolucci was shooting the coronation sequence.
Critics were understandably bowled over by the film’s scale – Roger Ebert deemed Bertolucci’s location work “astonishing” – as were awards voters: at the Oscars, the film won all nine categories in which it had been nominated. For Thomas, it was both a high watermark and, he confessed, “a difficult film to emulate”; his subsequent Bertolucci projects – the Tangiers-shot Paul Bowles adaptation The Sheltering Sky (1990) and the spiritual drama Little Buddha (1993) – struggled to emerge from their predecessor’s shadow.
Yet Thomas’s talent portfolio kept expanding. To the sensual Bertolucci, he added the cerebral David Cronenberg, resulting first in the bugged-out, free-associating William Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch (1991), then Crash, the Canuck’s polarising take on JG Ballard’s tale of jaded fetishists who engineer traffic collisions in a bid to feel something. This, too, was a challenge: Thomas described the source as “one of those books you have to look away from as you are reading it.”
Drolly detached though it was, Cronenberg’s film proved no less provocative, having to swerve aggravated press campaigns and localised censorship restriction to emerge as a minor hit. Yet Crash exemplified Thomas’s policy of backing directors to the hilt: “All the choices I still defend as being from taste, not market driven… When you look at a painting by an artist you normally recognise their style of painting. When you make film you should be somewhat able to recognise the filmmaker as well.”
Jeremy Jack Thomas was born in Ealing on July 26, 1949, one of two children for director Ralph Thomas and wife Joy. He claimed to have been “born with a silver reel in my mouth”: Ralph’s Doctor in the House (1954) launched a series that provided the British film industry with its post-War backbone, while his uncle Gerald directed all thirty Carry On movies. The young Jeremy spent his holidays in studios or out on location; from the age of ten, he was set on making films.
Upon leaving school, he took a job in film processing before being promoted to the cutting rooms. His first assistant editor gig was a brush with the old Hollywood: the trippy folk horror Tam Lin (1970), directed by Roddy McDowall and starring Ava Gardner. Subsequently, he worked on Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971), the landmark Jamaican reggae film The Harder They Come (1972) and the Great Depression collage Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (1975); the latter’s Australian director Philippe Mora then enlisted Thomas to produce Mad Dog Morgan.
As the millennium loomed, Thomas bolstered his internationalist credentials. Upon founding the sales agent Hanway Films in 1998, one of his first projects was the Bhutanese sleeper hit The Cup (1999), written and directed by Khyentse Norbu, about two young monks attempting to source a television on which to watch the World Cup final; it was, said Thomas, “a very happy story for everybody involved”.
Back at home, Thomas took a chance on the emergent ad maven Jonathan Glazer; the result, the electrifying Sexy Beast, proved the standout title of the British gangster cycle, as visually striking as it was profane. The producer rejoined Bertolucci for the Paris ‘68 drama The Dreamers (2003); he ventured into the American heartlands with Terry Gilliam’s Tideland (2005) – which passed off British Columbia as a flyblown Texas – and Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation (2006).
Increasingly, Thomas’s credits alternated established names with fresh talent. He reteamed with Cronenberg for A Dangerous Method (2011) and with Skolimowski for Essential Killing (2010) and the Oscar-nominated EO (2022). Yet he also backed emergent visionaries, ranging from the agitated Japanese genre specialist Takeshi Miike (13 Assassins, 2010; First Love, 2019) to the elegant Italian fabulist Matteo Garrone (Tale of Tales, 2015; Pinocchio, 2019).
He worked until the end: his Werner Herzog drama Bucking Fastard (2026) premiered in Venice a week before his death, while his latest Miike production, Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo (2026), premiered in Toronto this week. He even tried directing himself: All the Little Animals (1998), adapted by his wife Eski from a Walker Hamilton novel, concerned a troubled young man (Christian Bale) who finds solace in nature. Thomas claimed it was his only production to go over budget: “I was arguing with myself, so I always won either way.”
He received BAFTA’s Michael Balcon award in 1991, served as Chairman of the BFI between 1992 and 1997, and was made a Fellow of the BFI in 1998; in 2006, he received the European Film Award for Outstanding Achievement in World Cinema; and he received a CBE in 2009 for services to film. He also inspired the affectionate tribute The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021), in which director Mark Cousins joined the producer as he made his annual road trip to Cannes in his Alfa Romeo.
In 2017, Thomas told Cineaste: “I never merely make a film because I think it’s going to hit the market. I’m making it because I like the people and the subject involved and I think it’s going to hit the market, but it’s not made for the market — it’s made for a passion. I join somebody’s passion or they join my passion. And it’s worked: I’ve managed to have a long run, a longer run than many... I still wake up every day thinking about the movies.”
He married twice; his first marriage to Claudia Frohlich ended in divorce, his second was to Eski (née Vivien Coughman), who died in 2023. He is survived by Jack and Joshua, his two sons by Eski, and by Jessica, his daughter by Frohlich.
Jeremy Thomas, born July 26, 1949, died September 11, 2026.
