Mark Peploe obituary: British screenwriter who wrote for Antonioni and Bertolucci

A cosmopolitan figure with a rich cultural heritage, the Oscar-winning British screenwriter and director Mark Peploe – who has died at 82 following a long illness – worked with a wide range of European arthouse icons, including Jacques Demy, René Clément and Michelangelo Antonioni. But he was best known for his serial collaborations with his brother-in-law, the legendary Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, all backed by veteran British producer Jeremy Thomas.

“He was my good friend for more than 40 years,” Thomas tells the BFI. “A magnificent writer and a multifaceted, cultivated, renaissance man; a multilingual scholar who was happiest with a whisky or cappuccino in a square in Rome, with a Herald-Tribune and a notebook.”

Hailing from a dynasty of globe-trotting bohemian aesthetes, Peploe was born to be an artist. His mother was the celebrated painter Clotilde Brewster Peploe, granddaughter of German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand. In 1939, ‘CloClo’ married Willy Peploe, son of Scottish colourist painter S.J. Peploe, who later made his career as an art dealer and gallery director. The family was mostly based between Florence and London, but spent extended periods all around Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa. Mark himself was born in Kenya in 1943.

In his late teens, Peploe hitchhiked around Afghanistan and Nepal, fuelling a wanderlust that never left him. In an early brush with the cinematic world, he and his older sister Clare stumbled across David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) sets during a trip to Morocco. After studying politics and philosophy at Oxford, he worked as a BBC researcher before joining the London branch of Canadian production company Allan King Associates. There he earned his first co-writer and co-director credits on short profile documentaries of cultural icons including Max Frisch, Oscar Niemeyer and Melina Mercouri.

But Peploe’s life-changing crossroads moment came at a party in swinging London, where he first encountered legendary Italian art-house auteur Michelangelo Antonio, who was shooting his classic cryptic murder mystery Blowup (1966). The director initially tried his seductive charms on Peploe’s younger sister Chloe, but she introduced him to their older sister Clare instead. The pair ended up in a long romantic relationship, cementing Mark’s long friendship with Antonioni.

A celebrated filmmaker and screenwriter in her own right, Clare Peploe went on to marry Bertolucci in 1979. Peploe would do his greatest work in fruitful partnership with these two Italian maestros. They were “lifelong friends, great friends,” says Peploe’s daughter Lola, herself a filmmaker and actor. “Two of his dearest and nearest soulmates.”

The first of Peploe’s feature co-writing credits was on French director Jacques Demy’s The Pied Piper (1972), an ambitious but flawed musical version of the evergreen cautionary folk tale. He made a bigger splash with his next collaboration, Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), arguably his greatest work. This haunting philosophical road movie stars Jack Nicholson as David Locke, a disillusioned news reporter who becomes an existential drifter, recklessly assuming a dead man’s identity, an escape route that proves to be a lethal trap.

“Who we are is the central issue,” Peploe explained in a 1975 interview with Time Out magazine. “It turns out nobody knows who anyone is… David Locke wants to change, wants to care, but he doesn’t even know who he is trying to become.”

The Passenger was a deeply personal project for Peploe, and he initially spent years trying to direct it himself. Eventually, he was forced to concede that his friend Antonioni was a safer bet for producer Carlo Ponti. “Mark actually always said nobody could have done it better than Michelangelo,” Lola recalls. “He was just so pleased and happy that it happened in the end.”

Peploe’s most autobiographical screenplay, The Passenger distilled much of his own essence into Nicholson’s rootless anti-hero. “It is so much a story of his own heart,” says Lola. “That is sort of Mark himself speaking in the character of Locke. He was mysterious and quite difficult to pin down, a traveller and a loner.”

The Passenger is particularly personal for Lola Peploe too, because both her parents worked on the film. Ever the silver-tongued charmer, Antonioni persuaded her mother Louise Stjernsward to help style the film by flattering her hippie-chic style, insisting “I just want the characters to look like you.” And so began Stjernsward’s long career as a costume designer. “I still have the shirt that Maria Schneider wears in the film,” says Lola. “Actually my son, who’s six, wears it sometimes.”

Peploe enjoyed his most high-profile career phase working with Bertolucci and Thomas on three widescreen epics: The Last Emperor (1987), The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993). The first of these, a lavish biographical drama about the last emperor of China, Puyi, became a rare huge success both critically and commercially, earning Peploe an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. This helped him realise his long-cherished ambition of directing his own features, scoring positive reviews but limited box office with his psychological horror fable Afraid of the Dark (1991) and his all-star Joseph Conrad adaptation Victory (1996).

In his later years, Peploe struggled to get more passion projects to the screen. A romantic thriller entitled Out of the Blue, and maritime action yarn called The Crew, originally conceived with Antonioni, remain unfilmed. One that came tantalisingly close is Heaven and Hell, an opulent period biopic about the trailblazing 16th-century Italian composer Gesualdo da Venosa, notorious both for murdering his first wife and her lover, and for inventing musical modernism centuries before anyone else.

Bertolucci initially planned to direct Heaven and Hell, before his death in 2018. Martin Scorsese then showed keen interest, but was sidetracked by other projects. “That was the last dream I had with him, to make that script,” Jeremy Thomas says. “It was meant to be the last of Bertolucci’s grand epics.”

With Peploe’s passing, Thomas laments, we lose one more crucial figure from arthouse cinema’s golden age, when film culture had deeper significance as a vital way of understanding the world alongside literature, visual art, philosophy and politics. “Mark was a very literary figure,” Thomas says. “He wrote long-hand, with a pen and ink. Right to the end he was still writing like that.”

• Mark Peploe, 3 March 1943 to 18 June 2025