Donald Cammell

The British Film Institute posthumously referred to him as a "true visionary".

• Name — Donald Cammell • Birth Name — Donald Seton Cammell • Born — 17 January 1934 • Birthplace — Edinburgh, Scotland • Died — 24 April 1996 • Place of death — Los Angeles, California, U.S. • Education — Royal Academy of Arts • Occupation — * Film director • screenwriter • painter • Spouse — * China Kong (m. 1978) • Children — Amadis Cammell (b. 1959)

• Illustration — Outlook Tower, Castlehill, Royal Mile, Edinburgh Donald Seton Cammell was born 17 January 1934 in the Outlook Tower on Castlehill, on the approach to Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. He was the elder son of the poet and writer Charles Richard Cammell (who wrote a book on occultist Aleister Crowley) and Iona Macdonald. His middle name Seton came from his godfather, the Scottish naturalist Seton Gordon. He was educated at Shrewsbury House School and Westminster School. Brought up in a bohemian atmosphere, Cammell was raised in an environment he described as "filled with magicians, metaphysicians, spiritualists and demons" including Aleister Crowley. Charles Richard Cammell had known Crowley personally and was an admirer of the magus, particularly of his poetry. In Charles Cammell's 1962 biography Aleister Crowley: The Man: The Mage: The Poet, he wrote that Crowley "was a poet of lyric genius." Owing to his father's relationship with the diabolist, Donald Cammell met Crowley. He claimed he sat on Crowley's lap. As an actor, Cammell would play Osiris in Lucifer Rising, a film made by Kenneth Anger, a Crowley disciple who based the film on Crowley's poem "Hymn to Lucifer".

Cammell was a precociously gifted painter, winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Arts at the age of 16. He subsequently studied in Florence with Annigoni and made his living as a society portrait painter. In 1953, one of his portraits was hailed as "society portrait of the year". After the end of a short-lived early marriage, he moved to New York to live with model Deborah Dixon and concentrate on painting nudes.

Cammell was married twice, first to the Greek actress Maria Antippas (1928–2021, m. 1954–?), by whom he had a son Amadis (b. 1959), and then to the American writer China Kong (m. 1978). He is survived by his son and his second wife.

On the night of 24 April 1996, Cammell shot himself in the head in his Hollywood Hills home. He took 45 minutes to die, during which time he talked about his movie Performance (which features Mick Jagger's character being shot in the head in an assisted suicide) with his wife, China Kong, asking her to provide him with a mirror so he could witness his own death, mirroring a scene from his film White of the Eye. Friends told the press he was suffering from severe chronic depression. Cammell's depression reportedly was exacerbated by the studio's recutting of his recent movie Wild Side without his permission. In an article for Senses of Cinema, Maximilian Le Cain wrote "[Cammell] was alive and conscious for up to 45 minutes afterwards and, reportedly, was in a happy, almost euphoric state. The fact that he didn’t die instantly was not accidental; in fact he allegedly requested that his wife and writing collaborator China Cammell hold up a mirror so he could watch himself die and asked her ‘Do you see the picture of Borges?’"

• Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance (1999, directed by Kevin Macdonald and Chris Rodley)

• Year — Title — Artist • 1984 — Pride (In the Name of Love) — U2 • 1985 — Lie for a Lie — Nick Mason, Rick Fenn • All You Zombies — The Hooters • 1993 — Love Is Blindness — U2

• Year — Title — Role — Director • 1967 — La Collectionneuse — Man in Saint-Tropez — Éric Rohmer • 1972 — Lucifer Rising — Osiris — Kenneth Anger

• Year — Title — Director — Writer — Notes • 1970 — Performance — Co-directed with Nicolas Roeg • 1977 — Demon Seed • 1987 — White of the Eye — Co-writer with China Kong • 1995 — Wild Side

• Year — Title — Director — Writer — Notes • 1999 — The Argument — Filmed in 1971 Posthumous release