James Foley, who directed ‘Glengarry Glen Ross,' ‘House of Cards,' and music videos, dies at 71

Boston Globe

10-05-2025

Mr. Foley went on to build a distinguished career as the director of movies, television shows and music videos.
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Among his most celebrated works is the 1992 film adaptation of 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 play about real estate salesmen trying to make ends meet in a tough economy. The movie, with an all-star cast that included Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin and Kevin Spacey, was critically acclaimed but did not do well at the box office. (A revival of the play is currently on Broadway.)
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Mr. Foley was also known for directing 'Fifty Shades Darker' (2017) and 'Fifty Shades Freed' (2018), the final two installments of the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' franchise, adapted from the second and third books of the E.L. James trilogy and starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2017, Mr. Foley said he was pleased that he had not been pigeonholed as a filmmaker.
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'I think in terms of what fascinates me and what intrigues me and what I feel is engaging for the year that you spend making the movie, what's personally engaging, not adhering to any kind of conventions,' he said.
James Foley was born Dec. 28, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Frances, managed the home; his father, James Vincent Foley, was a lawyer.
Mr. Foley grew up on Staten Island. He studied psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo and graduated in 1974. He planned to attend medical school, but he changed his mind and decided to pursue directing instead after taking a six-week film production course at New York University. He went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in 1979.
Speaking to film and media studies students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in 2013, he recalled screening the short film he had made as part of that production course in New York.
'That was the first time that something I had done got a reaction out of a lot of people,' Mr. Foley said. 'From that moment on, I decided I wanted to do that again.'
His films also included 'At Close Range,' a 1986 crime drama starring Sean Penn and Christopher Walken; the 1990 film adaptation of Jim Thompson's crime novel 'After Dark, My Sweet,' starring Jason Patric, Rachel Ward and Bruce Dern, which he also co-wrote; 'Fear' (1996), starring Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon; 'The Chamber' (1996), with Chris O'Donnell and Gene Hackman; and 'Perfect Stranger' (2007), with Halle Berry and Bruce Willis.
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Mr. Foley's credits as a music video director included Madonna's 'Live to Tell,' 'True Blue' and 'Papa Don't Preach.'
His first foray into television was an episode of 'Twin Peaks' in 1991. He later directed 12 episodes in the first three seasons of 'House of Cards,' the hit Netflix series, originally starring Spacey, about the underbelly of American government, adapted from a BBC series of the same name. He also directed episodes of 'Wayward Pines' and 'Billions.'
Mr. Foley is survived by a brother, Kevin; two sisters, Eileen and Jo Ann Foley; and a nephew, Quinn Foley. Another brother, Gerard, died before him.
'I've had a very fluid career of ups and downs and lefts and rights, and I always just responded to what I was interested in at the moment,' Mr. Foley told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. 'I've always just followed my nose, for better or for worse, sometimes for worse.'
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