David Hemmings Legendary actor, director, and icon of the Swinging Sixties (2025)

David Hemmings became a symbol of Swinging Sixties London virtually overnight with the existential thriller Blow-Up, which successfully tapped into the new spirit of youth, its fashions, music, lifestyle, and sexual freedoms, though few realised that Hemmings had already been in film, television, theatre, and opera for more than a decade.

He joined the elite of new young British acting talent who included Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Richard Harris, but never fully exploited the success of Blow-Up, and moved behind the cameras into producing and directing. ''People thought I was dead,'' he told one interviewer last year, ''but I wasn't - I was directing The A-Team.''

Recently, he experienced a career revival, appearing in Gladiator (2000), Last Orders (2001), Mean Machine (2001), Gangs of New York (2002), and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003).

He had just finished shooting his final scene for a new supernatural thriller Blessed, with Heather Graham, on location in Romania, when he collapsed and died of a heart attack on Wednesday night. He was 62 years old.

Hemmings was born in Guildford in 1941. The son of a former band leader and office-supplies salesman, he displayed prodigious artistic talents and, by his mid-teens, had sung with English Opera, had staged an exhibition of his paintings, and made movies.

He was the original Miles in Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw in 1954, and Britten encouraged him to go to Florence to study to become a full-time professional opera singer. A small role in The Rainbow Jacket, a moralistic tale about horse racing, provided him with his first film role that same year. Spoilt for choice, he went to art school and continued to paint regularly throughout his life.

He had a starring role in The Heart Within (1957) as a boy who helps a West Indian wrongly suspected of murder, and managed to get regular work in British film and television. Despite the fact that Blow-Up was undoubtedly his big movie break, he reckoned he had made 47 films by then, though the Internet Media Database puts it at 18, including a few major TV projects.

However, he was still sufficiently obscure for Terence Stamp to ask : ''David Hemmings - and who's he when he's out?'' when the director Michelangelo Antonioni told Stamp he was dropping him and his model girlfriend Jean Shrimpton from the lead roles in Blow-Up and giving them to Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave instead. The film was partly inspired by a short story about an ambiguous brief encounter, and partly by a magazine article about David Bailey and several other photographers, who all recorded London's fast-moving, often-changing celebrity scene and became an integral part of it.

Hemmings's seemingly aimless character visits a local park, chases pigeons, and takes random photographs. But when he enlarges them, he begins to think he may have evidence of a murder. The film challenged the censors with scenes of sex and nudity while retaining the cerebral high ground by questioning perceptions of reality.

Having attained near-iconic status with a film so closely in tune with the times, Hemmings seemed determined to undermine his achievement by making three major historical films in quick succession.

He was Mordred, illegitimate son of Richard Harris's King Arthur in the musical Camelot (1967) - though he was only 11 years younger than Harris; he was an impetuous young officer in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968); and he played the title character in Alfred the Great (1969), which was not only a period drama, but a major box-office flop.

Hemmings enjoyed yet another supporting role in one other decade-defining movie, the Jane Fonda sci-fi romp Barbarella (1968). He was reunited with Harris in the thriller Juggernaut (1974) and co-starred with Anthony Newley in Mister Quilp (1975), a musical version of The Old Curiosity Shop, which marked an attempt by Reader's Digest to move into films. But his acting career was rapidly brought to a halt and went into a steep decline in the 1970s.

With partner John Daly, Hemmings founded Hemdale, a management company that branched out into film production, and became something of a major player. He made his directorial debut with Running Scared (1972), starring the second of his

four wives, American actress Gayle Hunnicutt.

He also directed Just A Gigolo (1979), a period drama with David Bowie, Kim Novak, and Marlene Dietrich, in her last film role, though much of his work in the 1980s was in television, on shows such as Magnum PI, The A-Team, and Murder, She Wrote.

An old friend suggested him for the role of MC in Gladiator (2000), which reunited him with 1960s contemporaries Richard Harris and Oliver Reed, with whom he appeared in Michael Winner's Swinging Sixties movie The System in 1964. Harris and Reed have also died since Gladiator.

One of his better latest roles was as the fracticious Lenny in Last Orders (2001), an adaptation of Graham Swift's novel about friends who meet up to scatter an old mate's ashes. Hemmings, who had been strikingly handsome as a young man, was by this stage distinctly jowly and sported a pair of eyebrows that made him look like a human owl.

Nolan Hemmings, his son by Gayle Hunnicutt, bore a striking resemblance to a younger version of his father. Hemmings had six children from his first three marriages. His fourth wife, Lucy, was

by his side in Romania when he died.

David Hemmings, actor, director and producer; born November 18, 1941, died December 3, 2003.

David Hemmings Legendary actor, director, and icon of the Swinging Sixties (2025)

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