Peter Bogdanovich, legendary director and The Sopranos actor, dies at 82

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/mo...how-1235070769

An iconic director, film scholar and actor, Bogdanovich died early this morning of natural causes. He became an A-list director with 1971's The Last Picture Show, which earned him two Oscar nominations, and went on to direct well-regarded films What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. Later on, Bogdanovich became prominent as an actor, from playing other characters on The Simpsons and 8 Simple Rules to playing himself on Moonlighting -- starring his ex-girlfriend and The Last Picture Show star Cybill Shepherd -- and How I Met Your Mother. Bogdanovich most famously recurred on The Sopranos as Dr. Elliott Kupferberg, Dr. Melfi's therapist. He discussed being part of The Sopranos world, including directing a 2004 episode, just last year on the Talking Sopranos podcast. As a film scholar, Bogdanovich spent more than an hour interviewing Sopranos creator David Chase. "Well, it started when I did a guest shot on a show called Northern Exposure, for which the showrunner was David Chase, the guy who conceived The Sopranos," Bogdanovich told The Film Stage in 2018 of getting involved with The Sopranos. "He saw (my) dailies, and he said to me, 'Have you acted before?' And I said, 'I started as an actor – at 16 I was acting professionally! Why?' And so I had a couple days in Seattle playing myself for an episode, basically, and I met him there. And then seven years later he calls me and says, 'We’re doing a second season of a show called The Sopranos. We’ve got a therapist character who’s having so much trouble with Tony Soprano that she needs a therapist, and we were wondering if you could do that.' I told him I’d love to. So he said, 'Come on down and meet the writers,' and so I went on down and met the writers, auditioned, and got the part. They wrote me into sixteen episodes, and I loved it! I also directed one of the episodes – one that I wasn’t in. It was great fun – David wrote it (with Matthew Weiner), and I loved doing it." In 2020, Bogdanovich helped kick off Turner Classic Movies' first podcast, The Plot Thickens: I’m Still Peter Bogdanovich. In recent years, Bogdanovich had a recurring role on Epix's Get Shorty as the elderly father of Ray Romano's character.

David Chase recalls working with Peter Bogdanovich on Northern Exposure and The Sopranos

The Sopranos creator tells Variety he had a fun time working with the late director, who died Thursday at age 82. Chase was a showrunner on Northern Exposure when he asked Bogdanovich to play himself talking about Orson Welles during the fictional Cicely Alaska Film Festival. "He was so great," says Chase. "He was so placid and so real, and he didn’t overdue it, which is something people tend to do when playing themselves." Chase adds: "Then Sopranos came along and Melfi needed a therapist of her own and Peter just popped into my head automatically. He brought that bottle of water, which he always had with him when shooting or not shooting. He’d say something and then unscrew the top and take a gentlemanly sip and then go on with what he was going to say. That was Elliot Kupferberg, M.D. It also worked because he and Lorraine Bracco (who played Melfi) are so different. He’s so canny and removed, just sort of sitting there with his hands in his lap, and she was not that kind of psychiatrist. He personified a scientific outlook. He was frequently around the set and we had fun. We went out to dinner a lot, we drank a lot. He told great stories. You could hear them 10 or 12 times and it wouldn’t be enough. And he was a great mimic, so when he was voicing John Wayne or John Ford or Cary Grant, all of whom he knew, you’d get the whole person. It made you feel like you’d really missed out on something. You wished you’d been there. At some point during his work as Kupferberg, he said “How would you feel about me directing an episode?” So he did 'Sentimental Education.' I felt pretty secure. I knew he was a really good director. His directing style was a little bit different from the rest of the people that we had. He and I didn’t see eye to eye on some choices he had made in terms of coverage, but in the end it came out great. It was an important episode for us because it was all about Carmela having an affair." ALSO: Bogdanovich once said that The Sopranos separated itself from other shows because of its willingness to stay on a wide shot, to not cut, and to stay on people listening.

Lorraine Bracco recalls Peter Bogdanovich pretending he was Cary Grant while rehearsing on The Sopranos

"I personally am grateful to have had the time with Peter," Bracco tells GQ of Bogdanovich, reacting to the news of his death at age 81 after he played Dr. Melfi's therapist Dr. Elliot Kupferberg on the HBO drama. "I had a lot of fun with him," she adds. "We had met in passing before he was cast on The Sopranos. I knew a lot of people who knew Peter. I was definitely a fan of his movies. I know that I was so happy David Chase cast him as Dr. Elliot. He’s fun to be with. He’s unassumingly funny. He was very dry. He had a dry sense of humor. He is a great raconteur. He was great at imitating a lot of people. He had an ear for it. What I used to love, he used to do his lines as Cary Grant when we would do rehearsals. We kept in touch over the years. Peter Bogdanovich is Old Hollywood. He might have been Young Hollywood for people like Orson Welles and John Huston and John Ford. But for us, he was Old Hollywood. He was not intimidating. And his character was hateful! I hated him when he did the Jeopardy! theme song. I hated that. He outed Dr. Melfi and I hated him for that. Elliot’s water bottle was Peter’s water bottle that he carried with him at all times. He asked David if he could keep it and use it, and David said, 'Absolutely.' We all enjoyed Peter. He was fun. He was a fun guy. When I say 'fun guy,' he was complicated and interesting. Part of him was a big introvert, but he did enjoy the spotlight."