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Nicolas Roeg.Chris Jackson

Nicolas Roeg, a British director acclaimed for a string of films in the 1970s that included the rite-of-passage tale Walkabout, the psychological thriller Don’t Look Now and the David Bowie vehicle The Man Who Fell to Earth, died Friday. He was 90.

A son, Nicholas Jr., confirmed the death to Britain’s Press Association. The cause and location were not given.

Mr. Roeg came up through the filmmaking ranks, spending 20 years as a camera operator and cinematographer before serving as one of two directors (along with Donald Cammell) of Performance, a 1970 drama about the London rock world.

It starred Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, and Mr. Roeg would go on to feature other singers in acting roles – Mr. Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1976 and Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing in 1980.

If Mr. Roeg was known for casting rock stars, he also made an impression with one particular sex scene, in the 1973 film Don’t Look Now, about a grieving couple played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. The scene, which featured lots of crosscutting, was graphic for the time – so much so that as recently as this year, Mr. Sutherland still felt compelled to deny persistent rumours that the sex in it was not simulated.

Nicolas Jack Roeg was born on Aug. 15, 1928, in London to Jack and Mabel (Silk) Roeg. He entered the film business in 1947, making tea and operating the clapperboard at Marylebone Studios in London.

He worked his way up to camera operator and then cinematographer, receiving the director of photography credit on François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 and Richard Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, both in 1966.

Performance, his first directing credit, was completed in the late 1960s, but shelved because Warner Bros. had misgivings about it. Some critics savaged it when it was finally released, but its reputation grew over time. In 1999 it made the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 best British movies ever made, as did Don’t Look Now.

Walkabout, Mr. Roeg’s first solo directing credit, released in 1971, told the story of a teenage girl and her brother who were abandoned in the Australian desert and are befriended by a young Aborigine. Mr. Roeg was his own cinematographer on the film.

“Roeg uses the camera – wide shots, close-ups, colours and textures – to create a sense of unmediated perception,” A.O. Scott of The New York Times said of the film in a 2010 reassessment, “as if we were seeing the world for the very first time.”

The Man Who Fell to Earth further enhanced Mr. Roeg’s reputation for making challenging, visually adventurous films.

“You could call Roeg a pretentious director, but he is a gifted one, and many of his pretensions pay off in beauty, tension and a mysterious, unsettling power,” Jack Kroll wrote in reviewing the movie in Newsweek. “’The Man Who Fell to Earth’ has enough of these qualities to offset a sometimes maddeningly oblique style.”

Mr. Roeg, whose first marriage ended in divorce, married the actor Theresa Russell, whom he directed in Bad Timing, Eureka (1983), Insignificance (1985) and Track 29 (1988). His marriage to Ms. Russell ended in divorce. In 2005, he married Harriet Harper, whom he leaves. In addition to her and Nicholas Jr., he leaves several other children. Complete information on survivors wasn’t immediately available.

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