Mark Peploe obituary

The Guardian

23-06-2025

Mark Peploe, who has died aged 82, enjoyed his greatest success as a screenwriter with an Oscar for The Last Emperor (1987). It was shared with the director, Bernardo Bertolucci, who was also Peploe's brother-in-law, having married Mark's elder sister, Clare, in 1978.
The project drew on the memoir of the final emperor of China, Puyi, from the Qing dynasty, who was crowned in 1908 aged just three. He was exiled after the Beijing coup of 1924 and appointed by Japan as puppet emperor of Manchukuo until the end of the second world war; in later years he worked as a gardener in the botanical gardens in Beijing. The challenges for the biopic were twofold: to combine epic sweep with telling interpersonal and psychological detail, and to get the script past the Chinese censors so as to access filming locations within the Forbidden City.
The producer, Jeremy Thomas, recalled how Bertolucci and Peploe's judicious handiwork made negotiating with the Chinese authorities surprisingly easy: 'It was less difficult than working with the western studio system. [The censors] made only minor script notes and references to change some of the names, then the official stamps went on and the door opened, and we came in and set to work.'
The results achieved a rare mix of scale and substance: David Thomson called The Last Emperor 'a true epic but with an alertness to feelings as small and humble as a grasshopper'. It won four Golden Globes (including best drama motion picture) and three Bafta awards (including best film) before scooping nine Oscars, including best picture and best director. Collecting his best adapted screenplay award, Peploe joked: 'It's a great honour and hugely encouraging to anybody else who wants to write impossible movies.'
Two similarly ambitious though flawed projects with Bertolucci, the Paul Bowles adaptation The Sheltering Sky (1990) and the Tibetan lama drama Little Buddha (1993), fared less well.
Peploe came highly recommended from an Italian film-maker of an earlier generation, Michelangelo Antonioni – who had a seven-year personal and professional relationship with Clare from the mid-1960s. He had enlisted Mark to write The Passenger (1975), his tale of a jaded journalist (Jack Nicholson) who co-opts a dead arms dealer's identity. That project had its roots in two earlier Peploe assignments: his short story Fatal Exit, and his screenplay for Technically Sweet, an Amazon-set adaptation of Italo Calvino's L'Avventura di un Fotografo that Antonioni intended to direct before mounting costs made the producer Carlo Ponti anxious.
With the film theorist Peter Wollen, Antonioni and Peploe radically reworked the thematic core of these projects for The Passenger, planting one foot firmly in the bloody realities of the Chadian civil war of 1965-79 even as they pushed onwards towards rigorous philosophical investigation. 'Who we are is the central issue – and it turns out nobody knows who anyone is,' Peploe told Time Out on the film's release. '[Nicholson's protagonist] David Locke wants to change, wants to care, but he doesn't even know who he is trying to become.'
Although Antonioni was frustrated by studio cuts, the finished film hooked viewers searching for meaning amid the moral miasma of the Watergate years; the critic Andrew Sarris suggested that 'it may turn out to be the definitive spiritual testament of our times'. Yet after inheriting the rights from MGM on winning an unrelated legal dispute, Nicholson withheld The Passenger from distribution until the mid-2000s. On its 2006 reissue, Peter Bradshaw called it 'a classic of a difficult and alienating kind, but one that really does shimmer in the mind like a remembered dream.'
Born in Nairobi, in Kenya, Mark was one of three children of Clotilde (nee Brewster), a painter, and Willy Peploe, a gallerist and son of the Scottish colourist Samuel Peploe. Clare and Mark's younger sister was Cloe. Relocated first to Florence, later to Belgravia in central London, the siblings had an upbringing that was decidedly classical: Clotilde, the daughter of the painter Elisabeth von Hildebrand, insisted on having no art in the house that postdated Proust. Clare maintained she and her brother gravitated to film because 'it was one medium that [her parents] knew nothing about'.
From Downside school in Somerset, Mark went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study philosophy politics and economics. On graduation, he joined the Canadian producer and director Allan King as a researcher, working on films about arts figures for the BBC series Creative Persons (1968), although he grew frustrated with the documentary form: 'I thought that if you wrote the script, you would be able to control the movie more than I did.'
He gained his first writing credit alongside Andrew Birkin on Jacques Demy's atypically realist adaptation of The Pied Piper (1972), featuring the singer Donovan in the title role; he was also a co-writer on the French veteran René Clément's final film La Babysitter (1975). Neither was a great success, but Peploe soon began directing his own work, earning a Bafta nomination for his 26-minute Samson and Delilah (1985), adapted, with the poet Frederick Siedel, from a DH Lawrence short story.
Other writing included Clare's artworld romp High Season (1987), set on the Greek island of Rhodes. Yet nothing quite matched the impact of The Last Emperor. Of The Sheltering Sky, Roger Ebert sighed: 'I was left with the impression of my fingers closing on air.' Despite cameoing in the film, Bowles dismissed it, saying: 'The ending is idiotic and the rest is pretty bad.' The critics were tougher still on Little Buddha, circling around the casting of a kohl-eyed Keanu Reeves, though it fared better commercially.
Peploe's feature directorial debut came with Afraid of the Dark (1991), an offbeam horror item about an 11-year-old voyeur (Ben Keyworth) peeping out at an adult world beset by a razor-wielding killer; drawing on Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, it featured a memorably nasty scene involving a dog and a knitting needle. Yet his textured Joseph Conrad adaptation Victory (1996), starring Willem Dafoe and Irène Jacob, ran into distribution issues, prompting Trevor Johnston of Time Out to ask: 'What's so terrible about it that it was consigned to three years on the shelf?'
In the new millennium, Peploe served as a script consultant on Clare's lively Marivaux adaptation The Triumph of Love (2001) and as a mentor for the Guided Light scheme, run for aspiring film-makers by the Brighton-based Lighthouse organisation. Certain scripts remained unfilmed, notably Heaven and Hell, a Bertolucci passion project on the murderous composer Carlo Gesualdo, active around 1600, and action-thriller The Crew, from an Antonioni story. Peploe continued to tour the globe, though now as a guest of international film festivals. Asked at the 2008 event in Estoril, Portugal, where he sourced his best ideas, Peploe ventured: 'In cafes, watching the world go by.'
He was married to the costume designer Louise Stjernsward, and their daughter, Lola, made a documentary film, Grandmother's Footsteps (2023), about Peploe family life, starting from Clotilde. After the marriage ended in separation in 1997, he had a 20-year relationship with Gina Marcou. Cloe died in 2009 and Clare in 2021. He is survived by his partner of the last seven years, the historian Alina Payne, and Lola.
Mark Alexis More Peploe, screenwriter and director, born 24 February 1943; died 18 June 2025