Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas has died aged 77 at his country home in Oxfordshire, surrounded by family and loved ones, just days before the premiere of his latest film.
A statement said Mr Thomas had “passed away peacefully” on Friday. His latest collaboration, Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, is due to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday.
Mr Thomas was one of Britain’s best-known independent film producers, working across a career spanning decades with directors including Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg and Matteo Garrone.
Jeremy Thomas’s film career
He was best known for producing The Last Emperor, Bertolucci’s 1987 biographical drama about Puyi, the final monarch of China’s Qing dynasty.
The film, starring Joan Chen, Peter O’Toole and Vivian Wu, won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Mr Thomas went on to produce four further films with Bertolucci: The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers.
His other major credits included the 1990 drama The Sheltering Sky, starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger, and the 2015 dystopian thriller High-Rise, featuring Tom Hiddleston and Jeremy Irons.
Mr Thomas began in the film industry working in an editing department before taking his first producing role on Mad Dog Morgan, a 1976 Australian film about the 19th-century outlaw.
Although based in London, he became known for backing distinctive projects and collaborating with filmmakers from around the world. His credits included three films with Nicolas Roeg: Bad Timing, Eureka and Insignificance.
He also produced Nagisa Oshima’s war film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, which starred David Bowie as the British soldier Major Jack ‘Strafer’ Celliers.
Among his later work was Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, starring Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender in a drama about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
His recent projects included The Good Boy, a 2025 psychological thriller in which Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough play a married couple who abduct a teenager portrayed by Anson Boon.
Mr Thomas also worked with British directors on some of their earlier films, including Jonathan Glazer, Stephen Frears, Julien Temple and David Mackenzie.
He received the European Film Academy’s Outstanding European Achievement in World Cinema award in 2006 and was appointed a CBE in the 2009 New Year Honours.
