Michael Cimino Biography
Michael Cimino (1939 - 2006) was an American director. One of the directors of the "New Hollywood," Cimino achieved fame with The Deer Hunter (1978), which won five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Born in New York City and raised in a middle-class Italian-American family in Westbury, Long Island, Cimino was a talented artist. He majored in graphic arts at Michigan State and, in 1963, earned his MFA in painting from Yale, where he "attended" acting school and found his calling in fiction and entertainment. Having moved to Manhattan, he found work with a design company, decided to direct commercials and studied film technique by associating with prominent colleagues. A quick learner, Cimino was receiving high pay as a commercial director in 1965 and, in 1967, earning acclaim as a strikingly original commercial director. Then, in 1971, he went to Hollywood. Here Cimino made his debut as a screenwriter. Among the projects she wanted to work on, one was an adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. He soon found himself with the opportunity to come up with the screenplay for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which he wrote with Clint Eastwood in mind. Cimino went on to write the screenplay, as well as direct the film. With 1978's The Deer Hunter, Cimino achieved the glory that most filmmakers desire. Featuring stars like Robert de Niro and Christopher Walken, the war drama revolves around three steelworkers who are greatly affected after fighting in the Vietnam War. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards in 1979 and won five. but his next film, 1980's Heaven's Gate, an epic American Western, was a box office bomb. Critical and popular response was so poor that United Artists ended up withdrawing it. Cimino's attraction to Hollywood was never the same afterward, and until his death in 2016, many rumors spread about his final decades of life spent in isolation and out of the spotlight.
