Henry Jaglom, a unique independent filmmaker known for his intimate and unconventional films that explored the emotional landscapes of women, passed away on Monday at his Santa Monica home at the age of 87. He famously disregarded mainstream box-office pressures to craft his distinctive cinematic vision.
His daughter, Sabrina Jaglom, confirmed his passing.
With over 20 films to his name, Jaglom carved his own path, directing outside the traditional studio system and often challenging industry norms. While he penned or co-penned all his screenplays, his hallmark was an improvisational style, empowering actors to evolve their characters and craft dialogue spontaneously during filming.
This unique method led to verbose, uninhibited movies such as his 1983 romantic comedy, “Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?,” featuring Karen Black. Janet Maslin, reviewing it for The New York Times, observed that the film sometimes seemed on the verge of “chattering away its welcome” yet praised the “loose, funny abandon” and abundant spontaneity in its dialogue.
Operating on minimal budgets, Jaglom frequently filmed in cost-free locations. His 1995 family drama, “Last Summer in the Hamptons,” for example, was shot at his parents’ East Hampton, N.Y. home. He also often recruited actors from his close friends and even cast himself, his wife, and his ex-wife in his projects.
He frequently drew inspiration from his own life, no matter how personal or raw the experiences were.
After his divorce from his first wife, actress Patrice Townsend, they bravely revisited their past by co-starring in his 1985 comedy “Always.” The film depicted a middle-aged couple at a Fourth of July party, held in their former shared Hollywood home, as they confronted their decision to divorce.
His conversations with his second wife, actress Victoria Foyt, about starting a family, inspired the 1994 comedy “Babyfever.” This film, featuring a predominantly female cast, explored various facets of motherhood and the pressures of biological clocks.
“Babyfever” was one part of an unofficial trilogy dedicated to women’s aspirations and worries. The other films included “Eating” (1990), which depicted women at a birthday party revealing their food-related anxieties, and “Going Shopping” (2005), a sharp observation on retail therapy.
His passion for depicting women’s lives and concerns stemmed from their frequent neglect in mainstream cinema. In a recent interview, he remarked that Hollywood remains “a male town,” primarily run by male producers, directors, and writers, who often target their films at “teenage boys in the Midwest who want to see space aliens or vampires.”
He stated his own filmmaking goal was to reach “10 or 15 percent, hopefully, of the audience that wants to see grown-up films about human relationships.”
He conceded that his films were often polarizing, either deeply loved or intensely disliked. Many critics dismissed his work as rambling and self-indulgent, with The Guardian in 1991 labeling his movies as “cinema as personal therapy,” “psychobabble,” and “diaries as art.”
“It’s fortunate I’m so arrogant,” Jaglom once told The Guardian. “I don’t mind bad reviews. I used to send the worst ones to people as Christmas presents.”
Even his detractors often acknowledged his boldness. Janet Maslin, in her Times review of “Eating,” commented that if viewed dispassionately, the characters “would quickly become insufferable.” However, she added, “Mr. Jaglom’s attitude toward his film’s dizzying array of narcissists is extremely fond, which is a lot of what gives ‘Eating’ its warmth and humor.”
Despite the mixed reception, Jaglom also garnered significant praise. Roger Ebert, for instance, highly regarded his 1997 romance “Déjà Vu,” which starred Ms. Foyt, Stephen Dillane, and Vanessa Redgrave. This film skillfully used magic realism to narrate a story of love blossoming amidst midlife complexities, drawing inspiration from Jaglom’s own evolving relationship with Ms. Foyt.
Ebert praised the film as “not a weepy romantic melodrama, but a sophisticated film about smart people.” He further noted that the lead characters “make convincing lovers not because they are swept away, but because they regard what has happened to them, and accept it.”
Jaglom launched his Hollywood career in the 1960s, a transformative era when television’s ascendance dismantled the traditional studio system, creating opportunities for unconventional young talents like him.
He started his career as an actor, appearing in hippie-era films like Richard Rush’s “Psych-Out” (1968), a cinematic exploration of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury counterculture, starring Jack Nicholson and Susan Strasberg. The following year, Jaglom contributed to editing Dennis Hopper’s iconic counterculture film, “Easy Rider.”
In 1971, he made his directorial debut with “A Safe Place,” a film starring Tuesday Weld as a young woman grappling with reality in New York, caught between daily life and a childlike fantasy world. The movie also featured Jack Nicholson and a memorable late-career performance from Orson Welles.
The film highlighted his experimental tendencies with an avant-garde narrative that intertwined past, present, and future. In his review for The Times, Vincent Canby remarked that Jaglom “looks like a young director attempting to walk without ever having learned to crawl, which is too bad because there are indications that he might crawl with a good deal of style.”
Jaglom displayed similar thematic ambition, being among the first directors to address the profound psychological impact of the Vietnam War with his 1976 film “Tracks.” In it, Dennis Hopper portrayed a paranoid veteran accompanying a fallen comrade’s coffin by train to California for burial. The film’s sensitive subject matter led to its release being delayed for several years.
His film “Someone to Love,” a poignant reflection on loneliness and divorce, featured one of Orson Welles’s final screen performances. Welles, a close friend and mentor to Jaglom, with whom he shared almost weekly meals before Welles’s passing in 1985, appeared in the film released two years later. Movie historian Peter Biskind later compiled transcripts from their conversations into the 2013 book “My Lunches With Orson.”
“Orson once told me, ‘The enemy of art is the absence of limitations,’” Jaglom recounted in a 1994 interview with The Washington Post. He emphasized that this was the most crucial lesson he learned about filmmaking, explaining his preference for making movies on small budgets.
Henry David Jaglom was born in London on January 26, 1938. He was the younger son of Simon M. Jaglom, a financier and real estate developer, and Marie (Stadthagen) Jaglom, a noted philanthropist and socialite. His older brother, Michael Emil Jaglom, later appeared in many of his films, using the name Michael Emil.
His father, a Jewish man from present-day Ukraine, fled to Germany following the Bolshevik Revolution, where he married the German-Jewish Ms. Stadthagen. The couple then relocated to England in the late 1930s to escape Nazi persecution, finally settling in Manhattan when Henry was an infant.
After graduating from Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, Henry attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an active member of the esteemed Pennsylvania Players theater troupe. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1963 before continuing his studies with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio workshop in New York.
In 1966, Jaglom moved to Hollywood, securing roles in sitcoms like “Gidget” and “The Flying Nun.” The following year, he journeyed to Israel to produce an eight-millimeter documentary on the Six-Day War, a work that captured the attention of Bert Schneider, the producer behind “Easy Rider.”
He is survived by his daughter, Sabrina, and his son, Simon Orson Jaglom, both from his marriage to Ms. Foyt, which concluded in divorce in 2013.
Embracing his often-criticized reputation, Jaglom engaged in self-parody with his 1992 film “Venice/Venice,” playing a self-absorbed maverick director at the Venice Film Festival. Janet Maslin noted in The Times that “Henry Jaglom knows exactly what his critics think of him, and in ‘Venice/Venice’ he tries to beat them to the punch.”
His distinct quirks were further explored in the unsparing 1995 documentary “Who Is Henry Jaglom?,” directed by Henry Alex Rubin and Jeremy Workman.
Regardless of public and critical opinion, Jaglom remained steadfast in his artistic vision. In a 1994 interview with The Chicago Tribune, he stated, “There are always people who think you’re not supposed to show the pain, just the solution. But I think you’re supposed to show the truth. I don’t have any solutions.”