Hal Ashby Biography
Hal Ashby was a famous American film director and editor born in Ogden in 1929. His career was characterized by great experimentation with various film genres, but his work was influenced by the protest cinema of the seventies. Ashby experienced a difficult childhood and adolescence, marked by his parents' divorce and his father's subsequent suicide. After studying literature at Utah State University, he distinguished himself as a theater director with his version of GB Shaw's play, 'Androcles and the lion'. Subsequently, he moved to Los Angeles, where he began working as a film editor, collaborating with Tony Richardson and above all with Norman Jewison, for whom he edited the famous film 'In the heat of the night', winning the Oscar for best editing in 1968. In many of his subsequent films, Ashby evocatively evoked the past: for example, in 1975's 'Shampoo', set in the 1960s and made even more vivid by Paul Simon's score, or in 'Bound for glory' from 1976, which tells three years in the life of W. Guthrie, the famous American folk singer, and which is set in the 1930s. In 1978's 'Coming Home', which earned him an Oscar nomination for best director, Ashby addressed the theme of the Vietnam War, showing the devastating effects on a woman seen in private. One of his most famous films was 'Being there' in 1979, based on a novel by J. Kosinski, which perhaps represents Ashby's most successful satire. The protagonist, played by Peter Sellers, is an illiterate gardener who mocks American high society; perhaps in this figure there are traces of the director's personal pain. Hal Ashby passed away in Los Angeles on December 27, 1988.
