Peter Bogdanovich Movies and Career Information

Peter Bogdanovich (born July 30, 1939) is an American film historian, director, writer, actor, producer, and critic. He was part of the wave of "New Hollywood" directors, which included William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Michael Cimino, and Francis Ford Coppola. His most critically acclaimed film is The Last Picture Show (1971). The son of immigrants fleeing the Nazis - his father, Borislav Bogdanovich, is a Serbian painter and pianist and his mother, Herma Bogdanovich, descended from an Austrian Jewish family - Bogdanovich was conceived in Europe but born in America. He was an actor in the 1950s, studying his craft with acting teacher Stella Adler (he was only 16 but lied about his age and said he was 18 to qualify), and appeared on television and in summer stock. In the early 1960s, Bogdanovich was known as a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. An obsessive cinema-goer, seeing up to 400 movies a year in his youth, Bogdanovich showcased the work of American directors such as Orson Welles and John Ford, whom he later wrote a book about based on the notes he had produced for the MoMA retrospective of the