Sidney Furie

Furie, Sidney

 Sidney Furie, film director (b at Toronto 28 Feb 1933). After training at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pa, he worked at the CBC as a television writer and director from 1954 before striking off as an independent filmmaker with 2 low-budget features, A Dangerous Age (1957) and A Cool Sound from Hell (1958). These gritty dramas of adolescent angst were praised abroad but failed to get Canadian distribution, and Furie thereupon left for greener pastures in Britain, where he coincided briefly with kitchen-sink realism in The Leather Boys (1964) and then had a big hit with the aggressively stylized The Ipcress File (1965). This success drew him to Hollywood, where he has since directed many films. There, his flashy visual style eventually gave way to a more sedate approach to big-budget commercial productions and he piloted many unremarkable mainstream productions during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. His notable movies from this period include The Appaloosa (1966), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Gable and Lombard (1976), The Entity (1981), Iron Eagle (1986), and Superman IV (1987). He remained active during the 1990s and beyond, but in commercial productions of increasing marginality.