Henry Jaglom, the maverick auteur who crafted deeply intimate and unconventional films that explored the intricacies of relationships and the quirkiness of human behavior, has died. He was 87.
Jaglom died Monday night at his home in Santa Monica, his daughter, Sabrina Jaglom, also a filmmaker, told The Hollywood Reporter.
“My dad was the most loving, fun, entertaining and unique father and the biggest cheerleader and champion anyone could be lucky enough to have,” she said.
The writer-director of such films as A Safe Place (1971), Sitting Ducks (1980), Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983), New Year’s Day (1989), Eating (1990), Last Summer in the Hamptons (1995) and Déjà Vu (1997), Jaglom drew from experience to make his work feel all the more personal and true to life.
Though he never achieved the star status of some of his contemporaries, Jaglom was celebrated as an original. His films, though often meandering, were rich with intricate dialogue and deeply woven characters and emphasized people over plots. He often did without a script or rehearsals.
Some considered him a genius; others thought he had no talent at all. Who Is Henry Jaglom? was the title of a 1995 documentary that attempted to get to the heart of the matter.
“Ultimately, whether you love or hate him or his films,” Who Is Henry Jaglom? co-director H. Alex Rubin once said, “you’ve got to give him credit for his stubborn commitment to remain outside of the mainstream and his refusal to compromise.”
In a 2012 interview with Slant magazine, Jaglom said he loved Hollywood movies as a youngster but “always felt there was a wall between me and them.”
“I wanted to make films where people felt that the line was blurred,” he added. “People have told me that they somehow feel less lonely by [watching] my films, because my films reveal that we’re all ‘bozos on this bus,’ if you know that expression. And, somehow, to share that fact, that we’re all going through these things, people feel they’re less in trouble. I try to break through that wall by showing our self-involvement while at the same time entertaining them.”
Straight out of college, Jaglom studied acting under Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio in New York, then appeared opposite Jack Nicholson in Psych-Out (1968) and in the actor’s directorial debut, Drive, He Said (1971). He also cast himself in many of his films.
He was a great friend of Orson Welles, one of his stars in A Safe Place. For about two years before Welles’ death, the two would meet for a weekly lunch at Ma Maison in Hollywood, and Jaglom recorded their lengthy exchanges as they dined. Those became the basis for Peter Biskind’s 2013 book, My Lunches With Orson.
Welles’ final acting appearance came in Jaglom’s Someone to Love (1987), and Jaglom showed up in Welles’ last film, The Other Side of the Wind, released in 2018 after 40 years in development.
Henry David Jaglom was born in London on Jan. 26, 1938. His father, Simon, was from Russia — he was jailed during the Russian Revolution in 1917 for being a capitalist — and his mother, Marie, was a descendant of German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Both came from wealthy families.
Jaglom was raised in New York City after his family moved there to escape the Nazis. He attended the University of Pennsylvania to study acting (Bruce Dern was a classmate), then returned to New York after graduation to work with Strasberg.
Peter Bogdanovich, preparing to direct his first film, Targets (1968), convinced Jaglom to move to Hollywood. He wanted him to star in his movie as a journalist but ultimately decided to play the role himself.
Jaglom landed guest spots on the Sally Field sitcoms Gidget and The Flying Nun and in the feature The 1000 Plane Raid (1969). He had been in the running to portray Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967) but lost out to Dustin Hoffman.
His friendship with Nicholson gave Jaglom an opportunity to help edit Easy Rider (1969) — Jaglom would go on to edit several of his own features — and a chance to pitch producer Bert Schneider a script he had written and wanted to direct.
That was A Safe Place, which starred Tuesday Weld as a mentally unstable flower child torn between a steady boyfriend, Fred (Phil Procter), and the sexy, dangerous Mitch (Nicholson).
The film opened the New York Film Festival but was poorly received, and it would take Jaglom another five years before he could get financing to make his second movie, the Dennis Hopper-starring Tracks (1976). It followed a Vietnam veteran as he takes the coffin of a fellow soldier on a cross-country trip to make sure his comrade gets a hometown burial.
In Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? Karen Black chewed the scenery — literally and figuratively — as a neurotic, insecure wife who turns to consuming a diner’s entire desert tray to cope when her husband leaves her.
In his review of the film, Roger Ebert wrote, “It will probably appeal to the kinds of people who liked both Harold and Maude and My Dinner With Andre. It is the kind of crazy, endearing film where you start out believing characters like this could never be real and end up realizing you know people just like them.”
Jaglom, in fact, often put women in the spotlight. In her final screen appearance, Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors turned in one of her best performances in Last Summer in the Hamptons as a diva who, when forced to sell her beloved beach home, transforms the family’s last visit into grand theater.
Eating featured an all-female cast talking about their loves, their lives and food; Babyfever (1994) explored a woman struggling with the decision to start a family; and Going Shopping (2005) revolved around a Beverly Hills boutique and delved into the obsession some woman have with buying clothes.
“Because I’m in theater, my films are set in the world of actors and the worlds of actors’ reality,” Jaglom said. “The other subject that obsesses me is women’s issues, which Hollywood ignores. Eating, Babyfever and Going Shopping deal with women’s attitudes about food, weight and clothing. I think people see these films and feel less alone going through these things. I try to tell the truth on film. I try to break that fourth wall.”
Many times, the characters Jaglom played in his films were thinly veiled versions of himself. He portrayed a hesitant divorcee in Always (1985), a film director in Someone to Love, New Year’s Day and Venice/Venice (1992) and a member of a multigeneration theatrical family in Last Summer in the Hamptons.
In Always, his first wife, Patrice Townsend, played Judy, the woman his character was divorcing (she also appeared in Sitting Ducks). The two married in 1979 and divorced two years before the film was released.
Jaglom co-directed and co-wrote Babyfever with his second wife, Victoria Foyt, whom he married in 1991. The two went on to write Last Summer in the Hamptons, Déjà Vu, Going Shopping and 2001’s Festival in Cannes. (Foyt also starred in all four of those films before she and Jaglom divorced in 2013.)
Jaglom met Tanna Frederick when the then-aspiring actress wrote him in praise of Déjà Vu. He cast her in Hollywood Dreams (2006) as an ambitious actress from Iowa (Frederick was a native), and she became his muse, starring in Irene in Time (2009), Queen of the Lot (2010), Just 45 Minutes From Broadway (2012), The M Word (2014) and Train to Zakopane (2018).
In addition to Sabrina Jaglom — she wrote and directed the 2022 thriller Jane — he is survived by his son, Simon (middle name: Orson). Both kids, from his marriage to Foyt, often appeared in his films, as did his older brother, Michael Emil, who died in 2019.
Jaglom was “truly one of a kind,” his daughter noted. “He lived his entire life exactly the way he wanted to, and encouraged everyone else to do the same. We all admire him, and he will be greatly missed.”
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