Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich (July 30, 1939 – January 6, 2022) was an American filmmaker, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian renowned for his contributions to the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s, where he directed critically acclaimed and commercially successful films such as The Last Picture Show (1971), What's Up, Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon (1973).

Born in Kingston, New York, to Serbian immigrant parents—father Borislav, a painter and pianist, and mother Herma, an Austrian-Jewish painter—Bogdanovich grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, immersing himself in cinema from a young age by maintaining a card file cataloging thousands of films he had viewed. He trained as an actor under Stella Adler in New York before transitioning to film criticism and programming at the Museum of Modern Art, where he authored influential books on directors including Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Fritz Lang, and Orson Welles, establishing himself as a passionate advocate for classic Hollywood cinema.

Peter Bogdanovich was born on July 30, 1939, in Kingston, New York, to Borislav Bogdanovich, a Serbian immigrant and artist who worked as a painter and pianist, and Herma Robinson Bogdanovich, an Austrian Jewish immigrant and painter from a well-off family. The couple met in Europe, where Borislav was Herma's piano teacher; they married in the mid-1930s, had a son Antonije born in 1937 who died in infancy in 1938, and immigrated to the US in 1939 on the cusp of World War II, while his mother, Herma, had escaped Austria with her mother in 1938 after the Nazi annexation, seeking refuge from antisemitic persecution amid the rising tide of Nazi aggression in Europe.