Director Joel Schumacher is dead

Schumacher was born in New York in 1939 and grew up under scarce circumstances. According to an interview in the Irish Times, his mother was Swedish, while the father, who was American, died when Joel Schumacher was four years old. He started working in the fashion industry, but after getting caught up in drug addiction and getting out of it, he decided to seek happiness in Hollywood.

Joel Schumacher started as a costume designer for, among other things, Woody Allen's "Sjusoveraren", wrote a film script and debuted as director in 1981. Four years later he got his first cash success with the movie "St. Elmo's four ”.

He replaced Tim Burton as director of the "Batman" films, first with "Batman Forever" in 1995 and then "Batman & Robin" in 1997, a movie that flopped in cinema. In a later interview, Joel Schumacher blamed the film company for wanting to make the movie kid-friendly, making it "kitschy and tragic". Schumacher was openly gay and according to actor George Clooney, the director wanted him to play the Batman character with homoerotic undertones, something Schumacher denied as late as 2019.

- If I wasn't gay you would never have said such things about me. These stories existed long before I came into the picture. Batman and Robin are two men living in a cave together. There have always been rumors that they were actually a couple, he told Variety.

After the "Batman" fiasco, he decided to darken low-budget films, including "8 mm" with Nicolas Cage and "Flawless" with Robert De Niro. His career spanned between war and action films, via drama "Veronica Guerin" with Cate Blanchett in the title role for the grand movie version of "The Phantom of the Opera" in 2004. His last film became "Trespass" from 2011 and a couple of years later he directed two episodes of "House of cards".

Joel Schumacher turned 80 years old.