Blake Edwards

Blake Edwards (born July 26, 1922, Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.—died December 15, 2010, Santa Monica, California) was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter who was best known for the classic romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffiany’s (1961) as well as the comedy The Pink Panther (1963) and its sequels.

Early life and work

Edwards’s parents divorced when he was age three, and his mother married motion-picture production manager Jack McEdward, son of J. Gordon Edwards, a silent-film director. The family moved to Los Angeles, where Edwards attended Beverly Hills High School. As a teenager Edwards worked as a script courier for Twentieth Century-Fox. After serving in the U.S. Coast Guard, he acted for several years in films, including bit parts in A Guy Named Joe (1943), Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). In the late 1940s he turned his attention to screenwriting, contributing first to the screenplay for Panhandle (1948) and then to the Mickey Rooney vehicles All Ashore (1953) and The Atomic Kid (1954). Along the way he created the hit radio series Richard Diamond, Private Detective for Dick Powell.

For several years Edwards collaborated with director Richard Quine on projects for Columbia Pictures—notably contributing to the screenplays for the Jack Lemmon comedies Operation Mad Ball (1957) and The Notorious Landlady (1962). At the same time, he began writing for television. His first films as a director were Bring Your Smile Along (1955) and He Laughed Last (1956), both of which starred Frankie Laine and were also written by Edwards. Other early efforts as a film director included Mister Cory (1957), with Tony Curtis, and the romantic comedy This Happy Feeling (1958).

Edwards made his mark in television as the creator of two well-received series: the stylish detective drama Peter Gunn (1958–61), which began his long collaboration with composer Henry Mancini, and Mr. Lucky (1959–60), which was about a floating casino. Returning to the big screen, he directed The Perfect Furlough (1959), with Curtis and Janet Leigh, before registering his first box-office hit with the military comedy Operation Petticoat (1959), which starred Cary Grant.

Films of the 1960s

Less popular was the comedy High Time (1960), in which Bing Crosby played a widower who returns to college and becomes romantically involved with an instructor. Edwards’s next project, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), was his breakthrough film and the one on which much of his reputation rests. The film was a loose adaptation of a Truman Capote novella, with an Academy Award-nominated screenplay by George Axelrod. It starred Audrey Hepburn in her signature role as Holly Golightly, a free spirit whose zaniness is a mask for insecurity and loneliness. One of the decade’s most romantic pictures, it was carried by the incandescent performance by Hepburn (who was nominated for an Academy Award as best actress) and by the charm of George Peppard as her love interest. They were much aided by the Hubert de Givenchy-designed outfits that Hepburn wore so stylishly and by the swelling score by Mancini, who shared an Academy Award with lyricist Johnny Mercer for “Moon River,” arguably one of the most romantic songs ever written for a motion picture.

Experiment in Terror (1962), a suspenseful crime story with Lee Remick and Glenn Ford, preceded Edwards’s next significant film, Days of Wine and Roses (1962), which had originated in 1958 as a Playhouse 90 television production. Lemmon and Remick starred in this harrowing account of a couple’s descent into alcoholism. Both actors were nominated for Academy Awards, and Mancini and Mercer won for yet another emotive theme song.

It was a long way from the hopeless anguish of Days of Wine and Roses to the inspired foolishness of The Pink Panther (1963), but Edwards was clearly in his element with this frenetic parody of the Hercule Poirot school of crime detection. Incorporating elements of low and high comedy, The Pink Panther deftly embraced broad slapstick as well as clever absurdist wordplay. Above all, it was propelled by Peter Sellers’s inspired portrayal of eternally bumbling Parisian Inspector Jacques Clouseau, whose mastery of misapprehension is hilariously augmented by a proclivity for mispronunciation and preposterously transparent disguises. David Niven played Clouseau’s charming criminal nemesis. So successful commercially was The Pink Panther that a sequel, A Shot in the Dark (1964), was immediately rushed into production. This time Edwards collaborated on the screenplay with William Peter Blatty, and the cast included Elke Sommer, George Sanders, and Herbert Lom, the last beginning a series of performances as Clouseau’s long-suffering, increasingly disturbed superior. A sequel that was viewed by most critics as having outstripped the original, A Shot in the Dark was arguably Edwards’s most sustained comic vehicle.

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The Great Race (1965), which featured an all-star cast, began a string of commercial failures for Edwards that included What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966), Gunn (1967), and The Party (1968), the last of which reteamed him with Sellers (as they put aside the bad blood that had come between them).

Films of the 1970s

Edwards’s new wife, Julie Andrews, starred as a German spy who falls in love with an English soldier (Rock Hudson) during World War I in Darling Lili (1970), a high-budget musical romantic comedy that was a box-office disaster. Much more modest in scale was The Wild Rovers (1971), a western buddy film with William Holden and Ryan O’Neal. It was dismissed at the time, but critical esteem for it grew over the years. The Carey Treatment (1972), a mystery set in a Boston hospital, was taken out of Edwards’s hands by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in postproduction, and his efforts to remove his name from it were fruitless.

During this period of disappointment and mental depression for Edwards, he and Andrews relocated to England and then to Switzerland. They worked together again on The Tamarind Seed (1974), an espionage tale that also starred Omar Sharif. Edwards’s fortunes changed dramatically when United Artists decided to revive the Pink Panther series. Working with Sellers again, Edwards in rapid order banged out the commercially successful, if unremarkable, Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), all shot in England. Once more bankable, Edwards returned to the United States to make 10 (1979), a romantic comedy that became an enormous hit. Dudley Moore was much praised for his deft comic timing in the role of man going through a midlife crisis who becomes smitten with a beautiful younger woman (Bo Derek). Andrews played his patient fiancée.

Later films

S.O.B. (1981) came next. A savage lampooning of the film industry, it received a mixed response from critics, who were much more in agreement with their general praise for Victor/Victoria (1982), which received a clutch of Academy Award nominations. It was based on a 1933 German film and starred Andrews as a starving performer in 1930s Paris who poses as a female impersonator to get work. When a Chicago mobster (James Garner) falls in love with her, profound gender issues are raised—a favourite theme of Edwards’s films.

Edwards then shot two more Pink Panther sequels simultaneously: Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), both of which suffered badly from the absence of the recently deceased Sellers. A 1983 remake of François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women with Andrews and Burt Reynolds in the lead roles, Micki & Maude (1984), with Moore playing a philandering husband, and the disappointing A Fine Mess (1986) followed.

Edwards’s next film, That’s Life! (1986), was one of his most personal. Lemmon (playing a character reminiscent of Edwards) starred as a middle-aged man filled with self-doubt and fear of mortality; Andrews, as his wife, confronts the possibility of cancer. Several members of the Edwards and Lemmon families played supporting roles, and the film was shot primarily in Andrews and Edwards’s home in Malibu, California. Bruce Willis starred in Edwards’s next two projects, opposite Kim Basinger in the farce Blind Date (1987) and as the cowboy actor Tom Mix investigating a murder in 1920s Hollywood in Sunset (1988). With Skin Deep (1989), Edwards returned to the world of the sexual farce, this time with John Ritter playing the role of a novelist with writer’s block. Switch (1991), Edwards’s penultimate theatrical release, had an intriguing concept—an egomaniacal ladies’ man is killed by a jealous girlfriend and is reincarnated as a woman (Ellen Barkin)—but its execution was clumsy. Son of the Pink Panther (1993), Edwards’s final film, was yet another unsuccessful attempt to find a replacement for Sellers, with Roberto Benigni taking on the role of Clouseau’s son. Although Edwards was finished directing motion pictures, he was not done directing, and in 1995 he mounted a stage-musical version of Victor/Victoria, again starring Andrews.

Edwards was awarded the Preston Sturges Award by the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America in 1993 for his body of work. In 2004 he was presented with an honorary award for lifetime achievement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.