NOTEWORTHY DEATHS

Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate director

In this Oct. 28, 2008 file photo, director Michael Cimino arrives at the third edition of the Rome Film Festival, in Rome. Cimino, whose film "The Deer Hunter" became one of the great triumphs of Hollywood's 1970s heyday, and whose disastrous "Heaven's Gate" helped bring that era to a close, has died.
In this Oct. 28, 2008 file photo, director Michael Cimino arrives at the third edition of the Rome Film Festival, in Rome. Cimino, whose film "The Deer Hunter" became one of the great triumphs of Hollywood's 1970s heyday, and whose disastrous "Heaven's Gate" helped bring that era to a close, has died.

LOS ANGELES -- Michael Cimino, the Oscar-winning director whose film The Deer Hunter became one of the great triumphs of Hollywood's 1970s heyday and whose disastrous Heaven's Gate is credited with phasing out that era, has died.

Cimino died Saturday at age 77, said Lt. B. Kim of the Los Angeles County coroner's office. He said Cimino had been living in Beverly Hills but he did not yet have further details on the circumstances of his death.

Eric Weissmann, a friend and former lawyer of Cimino's, said friends had been unable to reach Cimino by phone for the past few days and called the police, who found him dead in his bed. He said Cimino had not been ill that he had known of.

Cimino's masterpiece was 1978's The Deer Hunter, the story of the Vietnam War's effect on a small steel-working town in Pennsylvania. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Cimino. It helped lift the emerging-legend status of Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep. Christopher Walken also won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Despite controversy over its portrayal of the North Vietnamese and use of the violent game Russian roulette, the film was praised by some critics as one of the best American movies since The Godfather six years earlier.

Cimino's emerging career then took a U-turn with 1980's Heaven's Gate, a Western starring Kris Kristofferson and Walken that was a critical and financial disaster.

But Cimino always stood by the movie as an artistic accomplishment, or at least a project worth undertaking. The critical reputation for Heaven's Gate -- praised by some as a misunderstood masterpiece -- has been somewhat rehabilitated over the years, culminating in a 2012 restoration overseen by Cimino.

"I never second-guess myself," he told Vanity Fair in 2010. "You can't look back. I don't believe in defeat. Everybody has bumps, but as Count Basie said, 'It's not how you handle the hills, it's how you handle the valleys.'"

A Section on 07/04/2016

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