Peter Bogdanovich
Actor

Peter Bogdanovich Net Worth

Peter Bogdanovich was born on July 30, 1939 in  Kingston, New York, United States, is Actor, Director, Writer. Peter Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in Kingston, New York. He is the son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis, Herma (Robinson) and Borislav Bogdanovich, a painter and pianist. His father was a Serbian Orthodox Christian, and his mother was from a rich Austrian Jewish family. Peter originally was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with legendary acting teacher Stella Adler and appearing on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s he achieved notoriety for programming movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, sometimes seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich prominently showcased the work of American directors such as John Ford, about whom he subsequently wrote a book based on the notes he had produced for the MOMA retrospective of the director, and the then-underappreciated Howard Hawks. Bogdanovich also brought attention to such forgotten pioneers of American cinema as Allan Dwan.Bogdanovich was influenced by the French critics of the 1950s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, especially critic-turned-director François Truffaut. Before becoming a director himself, he built his reputation as a film writer with articles in Esquire Magazine. In 1968, following the example of Cahiers du Cinema critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich became a director. Working for low-budget schlock-meister Roger Corman, Bogdanovich directed the critically praised Targets (1968) and the not-so-critically praised Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), a film best forgotten.Turning back to journalism, Bogdanovich struck up a lifelong friendship with the legendary Orson Welles while interviewing him on the set of Mike Nichols' film adaptation of Catch-22 (1970) from the novel by Joseph Heller. Subsequently, Bogdanovich has played a major role in elucidating Welles and his career with his writings on the great actor-director, most notably his book "This is Orson Welles" (1992). He has steadily produced invaluable books about the cinema, especially "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors," an indispensable tome that establishes Bogdanovich, along with Kevin Brownlow, as one of the premier English-language chroniclers of cinema.The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by a critics as a Wellesian wunderkind when his most famous film, The Last Picture Show (1971) was released. The film received eight Academy Award nominations, including Bogdanovich as Best Director, and won two of them, for Cloris Leachman and "John Ford Stock Company" veteran Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich, who had cast 19-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film, fell in love with the young beauty, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from the film's set designer Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two children.Bogdanovich followed up The Last Picture Show (1971) with a major hit, What's Up, Doc? (1972), a screwball comedy heavily indebted to Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), starring Barbra Streisand and 'Ryan O'Neal'. Despite his reliance on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich had solidified his status as one of a new breed of A-list directors that included Academy Award winners Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, with whom he formed The Directors Company. The Directors Company was a generous production deal with Paramount Pictures that essentially gave the directors carte blanche if they kept within strict budget limitations. It was through this entity that Bogdanovich's next big hit, the critically praised Paper Moon (1973), was produced.Paper Moon (1973), a Depression-era comedy starring Ryan O'Neal that won his ten-year-old daughter Tatum O'Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, proved to be the highwater mark of Bogdanovich's career. Forced to share the profits with his fellow directors, Bogdanovich became dissatisfied with the arrangement. The Directors Company subsequently produced only two more pictures, Francis Ford Coppola's critically acclaimed The Conversation (1974) which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1974 and garnered Coppola an Oscar nod for Best Director, and Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller (1974), a film that had a quite different critical reception.An adaptation of the Henry James novella, Daisy Miller (1974) spelled the beginning of the end of Bogdanovich's career as a popular, critically acclaimed director. The film, which starred Bogdanovich's lover Cybill Shepherd as the title character, was savaged by critics and was a flop at the box office. Bogdanovich's follow-up, At Long Last Love (1975), a filming of the Cole Porter musical starring Cybill Shepherd, was derided by critics as one of the worst films ever made, noted as such in Harry Medved and Michael Medved's book "The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners, the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History" (1980). The film also was a box office bomb despite featuring Burt Reynolds, a hotly burning star who would achieve super-nova status at the end of the 1970s.Once again beholden to the past, Bogdanovich insisted on filming the musical numbers for At Long Last Love (1975) live, a process not used since the early days of the talkies, when sound engineer Douglas Shearer developed lip-synching at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The decision was widely ridiculed, as none of the leading actors were known for their singing abilities (Bogdanovich himself had produced a critically panned album of Cybill Shepherd singing Cole Porter songs in 1974). The public perception of Bogdanovich became that of an arrogant director hamstrung by his own hubris.Trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle that was his early success, Bogdanovich once again turned to the past, his own and that of cinema, with Nickelodeon (1976). The film, a comedy recounting the earliest days of the motion picture industry, reunited Ryan O'Neal and 'Tatum O'Neal' from his last hit, Paper Moon (1973) with Burt Reynolds. Counseled not to use the unpopular (with both audiences and critics) Cybill Shepherd in the film, Bogdanovich instead used newcomer Jane Hitchcock as the film's ingénue. Unfortunately, the magic of Paper Moon (1973) could not be repeated and the film died at the box office. Jane Hitchcock, Bogdanovich's discovery, would make only one more film before calling it quits.After a three-year hiatus, Bogdanovich returned with the critically and financially underwhelming Saint Jack (1979) for Hugh Hefner's Playboy Productions Inc. Bogdanovich's long affair with Cybill Shepherd had ended in 1978, but the production deal making Hugh Hefner the film's producer was part of the settlement of a lawsuit Shepherd had filed against Hefner for publishing nude photos of her pirated from a print of The Last Picture Show (1971) in Playboy Magazine. Bogdanovich then launched the film that would be his career Waterloo, They All Laughed (1981), a low-budget ensemble comedy starring Audrey Hepburn and the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten. During the filming of the picture, Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten, who was married to an emotionally unstable hustler, Paul Snider, who relied on her financially. Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, and when she told Snider she was leaving him, he shot and killed her, sodomizing her corpse before committing suicide.They All Laughed (1981) could not attract a distributor due to the negative publicity surrounding the Stratten murder, despite it being one of the few films made by the legendary Audrey Hepburn after her provisional retirement in 1967 (the film would prove to be Hepburn's last starring role in a theatrically released motion picture). The heartbroken Bogdanovich bought the rights to the negative so that it would be seen by the public, but the film had a limited release, garnered weak reviews and cost Bogdanovich millions of dollars, driving the emotionally devastated director into bankruptcy.Bogdanovich turned back to his first avocation, writing, to pen a memoir of his dead love, "The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten (1960-1980)" that was published in 1984. The book was a riposte to Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate" article written for The Village Voice that had won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize. Carpenter had lambasted Bogdanovich and Hugh Hefner, claiming that Stratten was as much a victim of them as she was of Paul Snider. The article served as the basis of Bob Fosse's film Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich was portrayed as the fictional director "Aram Nicholas".Bogdanovich's career as a noted director was over, and though he achieved modest success with Mask (1985), his sequel to his greatest success The Last Picture Show (1971), Texasville (1990), was a critical and box office disappointment. He directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen until 2001's The Cat's Meow (2001). Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the alleged murder of director Thomas H. Ince by Welles' bete noir William Randolph Hearst, The Cat's Meow (2001) was a modest critical success but a flop at the box office. In addition to helming some television movies, Bogdanovich has returned to acting, with a recurring guest role on the cable television series Gia Dinh Sopranos (1999) as Dr. Jennifer Melfi's analyst.Bogdanovich's personal reputation suffered from gossip about his 13-year marriage to Dorothy Stratten's 19-year-old-kid sister Louise Stratten, who was 29 years his junior. Some gossip held that Bogdanovich's behavior was akin to that of the James Stewart character in Alfred Hitchcock's necrophiliac masterpiece Vertigo (1958), with the director trying to remold Stratten into the image of her late sister. The marriage ended in divorce in 2001.Now in his mid-60s, Bogdanovich clearly has imitated his hero Orson Welles, but in an unintended fashion, as a type of monumental failure much beloved by the mythmakers of Hollywood. However, unlike the widely acclaimed master Welles, the orbit of Bogdanovich's reputation has never recovered from the apogee it reached briefly in the early 1970s.There has been speculation that Peter Bogdanovich's ruin as a director was guaranteed when he ditched his wife and artistic collaborator Polly Platt for Cybill Shepherd. Platt had worked with Bogdanovich on all his early successes, and some critics believe that the controlling artistic consciousness on The Last Picture Show (1971) was Platt's. Parting company with Platt after Paper Moon (1973), Bogdanovich promptly slipped from the heights of a wunderkind to a has-been pursuing epic folly, as evidenced by Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975).In 1998 the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress named The Last Picture Show (1971) to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to the most culturally significant films. Viewing Daisy Miller (1974) alongside The Last Picture Show (1971) should be a standard part of film school curriculum, as it tends to debunk the auteur theory. Bogdanovich's career gives truth to the contention that film is an industrial process and each movie has many "authors," not just one (the director). If the auteur theory were true, Bogdanovich arguably would have returned to form eventually and produced more good films, if not another masterpiece.He didn't - he didn't even come close. Thus, Bogdanovich will remain a footnote in cinema history, more valuable for his contributions to the literature of film than to the medium itself.
Peter Bogdanovich is a member of Actor

Age, Biography and Wiki

Who is it? Actor, Director, Writer
Birth Day July 30, 1939
Birth Place  Kingston, New York, United States
Age 84 YEARS OLD
Birth Sign Leo
Occupation Film director, actor
Spouse(s) Polly Platt (1962–1971) Louise Stratten (1988–2001)
Partner(s) Cybill Shepherd (1971–1978) Dorothy Stratten (1980)
Children Antonia Bogdanovich Sashy Bogdanovich

💰 Net worth: $3 Million (2024)

Peter Bogdanovich, the renowned actor, director, and writer from the United States, is estimated to have a net worth of $3 million in 2024. With a career spanning several decades, Bogdanovich has made a significant impact in the entertainment industry. He is known for his versatility as an artist, showcasing his talent both in front of and behind the camera. His contributions to film and television have garnered critical acclaim and commercial success, further solidifying his reputation as a talented and accomplished figure in the industry. As a result, Bogdanovich's net worth stands as a testament to his artistic prowess and enduring contributions to the world of entertainment.

Famous Quotes:

It’s just not like any other movie you know. It’s the first modern film: fragmented, not told straight ahead, jumping around. It anticipates everything that’s being done now, and which is thought to be so modern. It’s all become really decadent now, but it was certainly fresh then.

Biography/Timeline

1904

Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, the son of Herma (née Robinson) (1904–1978) and Borislav Bogdanovich (1899–1970), a Painter and Pianist. His Austrian-born mother was Jewish (her family moved from Vienna to Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1932), while his father was a Serbian Orthodox Christian; the two arrived in the U.S. in May 1939.

1950

Bogdanovich was influenced by the French critics of the 1950s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, especially critic-turned-director François Truffaut. Before becoming a Director himself, he built his reputation as a film Writer with articles in Esquire. These articles were collected in Pieces of Time (1973).

1960

Bogdanovich turned back to writing as his directorial career sagged, beginning with The Killing of the Unicorn - Dorothy Stratten 1960–1980, a memoir published in 1984. Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Playmate" article about Dorothy Stratten's murder was published in The Village Voice and won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize, and while Bogdanovich did not criticize Carpenter's article in his book, she had lambasted both Bogdanovich and Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner, claiming that Stratten was a victim of them as much as of her husband, Paul Snider, who killed her and himself. Carpenter's article served as the basis of Bob Fosse's film Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich, for legal reasons, was portrayed as the fictional Director "Aram Nicholas," a sympathetic but possibly misguided and naive character.

1966

In 1966, following the Example of Cahiers du Cinéma critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer who had created the Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave") by making their own films, Bogdanovich decided to become a Director. With his wife Polly Platt, he headed for Los Angeles, skipping out on the rent in the process.

1968

Bogdanovich also directed the thriller Targets (1968), the screwball comedy What's Up, Doc? (1972), the comedy-drama Paper Moon (1973) and the drama Mask (1985). His most recent film, She's Funny That Way, was released in 2014.

1970

In 1970, Bogdanovich was commissioned by the American Film Institute to direct a documentary about John Ford for their tribute, Directed by John Ford (1971). The resulting film included candid interviews with John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, and was narrated by Orson Welles. Out of circulation for years due to licensing issues, Bogdanovich and TCM released it in 2006, featuring newer, pristine film clips, and additional interviews with Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill, Harry Carey, Jr., Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and others.

1971

The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by critics as a "Wellesian" wunderkind when his best-received film, The Last Picture Show, was released in 1971. The film earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, and won two statues, for Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich co-wrote the screenplay with Larry McMurtry, and it won the 1971 BAFTA award for Best Screenplay. Bogdanovich cast the 21-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film and fell in love with her, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two daughters.

1972

Bogdanovich followed up The Last Picture Show with the popular comedy What's Up, Doc? (1972), starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal, a screwball comedy indebted to Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). Despite his reliance on homage to bygone cinema, Bogdanovich solidified his status as one of a new breed of A-list Directors that included Academy Award winners Francis Ford Coppola and william Friedkin, with whom he formed The Directors Company. The Directors Company was a generous production deal with Paramount Pictures that essentially gave the Directors carte blanche if they kept within budget limitations. It was through this entity that Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973) was produced.

1974

Daisy Miller (1974) was a disappointment at the box office. At Long Last Love (1975) and Nickelodeon (1976) were critical and box office disasters, severely damaging his standing in the film community. Feeling against Bogdanovich began to turn. "I was dumb. I made a lot of mistakes," he said in 1976.

1975

In 1975, he sued Universal for breaching a contract to produce and direct Bugsy.

1979

He took a few years off then returned to directing with a lower budgeted film, Saint Jack (1979), which was a critical success although not a box office hit. The making of this film marked the end of his romantic relationship with Cybill Shepherd.

1981

Bogdanovich's next film was the romantic comedy They All Laughed (1981), which featured Dorothy Stratten, a former model who began a romantic relationship with Bogdanovich. Stratten was murdered by her estranged husband shortly after filming completed.

1985

In the early 80s, Bogdanovich wanted to make I'll Remember April with John Cassavetes and The Lady in the Moon written with Larry McMurtry. He made the film Mask instead, released in 1985.

1988

On December 30, 1988, the 49-year-old Bogdanovich married 20-year-old Louise Stratten, Dorothy's younger sister. The couple divorced in 2001. The marriage was viewed as a scandal because of the age gap and his previous relationship with her sister.

1990

Bogdanovich's 1990 sequel to The Last Picture Show,Texasville, was a critical and box office disappointment.

1991

Bogdanovich was also fired off Duck, You Sucker! and Another You (1991), the latter while during filming. He turned down directing A Glimpse of Tiger, The Getaway (1972), King of the Gypsies (1978), Heaven Can Wait (1978), The Hurricane (1979) and Popeye (1980). He also turned down the role played by Dabney Coleman in Tootsie (1982). He also directed a scene in the John Cassavetes film Love Streams (1984).

1992

Bogdanovich directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen for several years. One, Noises Off..., based on the Michael Frayn play, has subsequently developed a strong cult following, while the other, The Thing Called Love, is better known as one of River Phoenix's last roles before his untimely death.

1998

In 1998, the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress named The Last Picture Show to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to culturally significant films.

2001

In 2001, Bogdanovich resurfaced with The Cat's Meow. Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the supposed murder of Director Thomas Ince by Orson Welles's bête noire william Randolph Hearst, The Cat's Meow was a modest critical success but made little money at the box office. Bogdanovich says he was told the story of the alleged Ince murder by Welles, who in turn said he heard it from Writer Charles Lederer.

2006

In 2006, Bogdanovich joined forces with ClickStar, where he hosts a classic film channel, Peter Bogdanovich's Golden Age of Movies. Bodganovich also writes a blog for the site. In 2003, he appeared in the BBC documentary, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and in 2006, he appeared in the documentary Wanderlust.

2007

In 2007, Bogdanovich was presented with an award for outstanding contribution to film preservation by The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) at the Toronto International Film Festival.

2010

In 2010, Bogdanovich joined the directing faculty at the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. On April 17, 2010, he was awarded the Master of Cinema Award at the 12th Annual RiverRun International Film Festival. In 2011, he was given the Auteur Award by the International Press Academy, which is awarded to filmmakers whose singular vision and unique artistic control over the elements of production give a personal and signature style to their films.

2012

In 2012, Bogdanovich made news with an essay in the Hollywood Reporter, published in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting, in which he argued against excessive violence in the movies:

2013

Intent on breaking into the industry, Bogdanovich would ask publicists for movie premiere and industry party invitations. At one screening, Bogdanovich was viewing a film and Director Roger Corman was sitting behind him. The two struck up a conversation when Corman mentioned he liked a cinema piece Bogdanovich wrote for Esquire. Corman offered him a directing job which Bogdanovich accepted immediately. He worked with Corman on Targets, which starred Boris Karloff, and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, under the pseudonym Derek Thomas. Bogdanovich later said of the Corman school of filmmaking, "I went from getting the laundry to directing the picture in three weeks. Altogether, I worked 22 weeks – preproduction, shooting, second unit, cutting, dubbing – I haven't learned as much since."

2014

Bogdanovich's most recent film, She's Funny That Way, was released in theaters and on demand in 2014.

Some Peter Bogdanovich images

About the author

Lisa Scholfield

As a Senior Writer at Famous Net Worth, I spearhead an exceptional team dedicated to uncovering and sharing the stories of pioneering individuals. My passion for unearthing untold narratives drives me to delve deep into the essence of each subject, bringing forth a unique blend of factual accuracy and narrative allure. In orchestrating the editorial workflow, I am deeply involved in every step—from initial research to the final touches of publishing, ensuring each biography not only informs but also engages and inspires our readership.