US director Bob Rafelson is dead. Rafelson died on Saturday at the age of 89 at his home in Aspen, Colorado, according to numerous US media.
They cited Gabrielle Taurek, who Rafelson married in 1999. Rafelson suffered from lung cancer.
Born in New York in 1933, Rafelson had also worked as a writer, producer and musician and was one of the so-called “New Hollywood” directors who revived the film industry from the 1960s onwards. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg were also among them.
Before that, he had his first successes on television, for example with the series “The Monkees” about a rock band.
One of Rafelson’s most successful feature films was Five Easy Pieces, a character study of a former pianist starring Jack Nicholson (1970).