- LONDON (AP) - Stanley Kubrick, the director of "2001:
A Space Odyssey" and "A Clockwork Orange," whose films often
puzzled and shocked audiences only to end up as classics, died Sunday at
his home in England, his family said. He was 70.
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- Police were summoned to Kubrick's rural
home north of London on Sunday afternoon, said authorities in Hertfordshire,
where he was certified dead. "There are no suspicious circumstances,"
police said.
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- Kubrick's family announced his death,
and said there would be no further comment.
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- Kubrick's films included "Spartacus"
in 1960, "Lolita" in 1962, "Dr. Strangelove" in 1964,
"2001" in 1968, and "A Clockwork Orange" in 1971.
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- He also made "Barry Lyndon"
released in 1975, "The Shining" in 1978, and "Full Metal
Jacket" in 1987.
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- Malcolm McDowell, who starred in "A
Clockwork Orange," issued a statement through his publicist calling
Kubrick "a heavyweight of my life."
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- "He was the last great director
of that era. He was the big daddy," said McDowell.
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- His latest film, "Eyes Wide Shut,"
is still slated for release on July 16, Warner Bros. said Sunday. Tom
Cruise and Nicole Kidman star in the story of jealousy and obsession, which
Kubrick made in great secrecy.
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- "He was like family to us and we
are in shock and devastated," Cruise and Kidman said in a statement
released by their publicist.
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- Kubrick was born July 26, 1928, in New
York.
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- At 17, he was hired as a staff photographer
by Look magazine, which had been impressed by a picture Kubrick had snapped
on the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt died.
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- While working at Look, he studied film
by attending screenings at the Museum of Modern Art.
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- "I was aware that I didn't know
anything about making films, but I believed I couldn't make them any worse
than the majority of films I was seeing. Bad films gave me the courage
to try making a movie," Kubrick once said.
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- In 1951, he sold a 16-minute short documentary
about a boxer, "Day of the Fight," to the RKO film studio.
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- Kubrick was drafted by actor Kirk Douglas
into the film "Spartacus" when the production -- then the most
expensive ever mounted in the United States -- ran into trouble. The film,
about a slave revolt in ancient Rome, included some footage shot by the
original director, Anthony Mann, and Kubrick did not regard the finished
product as a great success.
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- "I tried
with only limited success to make the film as real as possible but I was
up against a pretty dumb script which was rarely faithful to what is known
about Spartacus," Kubrick told an interviewer.
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- "Lolita," starring James Mason
and Shelley Winters, was based on Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel
about a professor who is sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old girl. The
work was filmed in Britain, in part because of censorship problems, and
thereafter Kubrick was based in Britain.
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- "Dr. Strangelove," starring
Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, was a black comedy about nuclear war
released in the early '60s during a period of great fears over the bomb
and Cold War tensions.
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- "2001," a science fiction film
about the evolution of man and humanity's place in the universe, used dazzling
visual imagery and an inspired use of music that proved to be a great success
for Kubrick.
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- In an interview with Playboy magazine,
Kubrick said he had "tried to create a visual experience, one that
bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious
with an emotional and philosophic content ... just as music does. ... You're
free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning."
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- "A Clockwork
Orange," set in a violent future, is a graphic film about a young
thug who carries out rapes and beatings before being sent to prison where
he is brainwashed.
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- The film was one of Kubrick's most controversial
-- it was even disparaged by Anthony Burgess, whose novel was the basis
of the film, and Kubrick eventually removed it from screens in Britain.
One of Kubrick's memorable touches was to have his hero sing "Singin'
in the Rain" while dishing out a brutal beating.
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- Kubrick married Suzanne Harlan in 1958,
and they had three daughters. Details about funeral arrangements were
not immediately available.
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