Mel Stuart, an award-winning filmmaker and documentarian who tackled such serious subjects as the assasination of John F. Kennedy and mental illness but is perhaps best known for directing the whimsical Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, has died. He was 83.
His daughter, Madeline Stuart, told the Associated Press that he died Thursday night of cancer at his home in Los Angeles.
He produced or directed various historical dramas including Ruby and Oswald (1978) and The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal (1979) and the touching 1981 TV film Bill, starring Mickey Rooney as mentally challenged man attempting to live on his own after leaving an institutiona. The telefilm won a Golden Globe and Peabody Award and earned the actor a Golden Globe and an Emmy.
During the 1960s and '70s, Stuart was associated with David L. Wolper, with whom he established a base of West Coast documentary production at a time when New York filmmakers and TV networks' news divisions dominated the field.
Stuart's documentaries during those years include The Making of the President 1960, for which he shared an Emmy with Wolper and writer Theodore White in 1964, as well as subsequent explorations of the campaigns in 1964 and 1968. Other programs were The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1968) and the Oscar-nominated Four Days in November (1964), which chronicles JFK's assasination in Dallas.
His groundbreaking 1973 film Wattstax focused on the Wattstax music festival of the previous year and Los Angeles' Watts community in the aftermath of the 1965 riots.
By 1980, Stuart was an independent producer and director whose credits include portraits for PBS' "American Masters" on artist Man Ray and writer-director Billy Wilder. He was executive producer of the 1980s ABC series "Ripley's Believe It or Not," hosted by Jack Palance.
The Hobart Shakespeareans, airing on PBS in 2005, was Stuart's profile of a teacher in inner-city Los Angeles whose fifth-grade class each year performed a play by William Shakespeare.
The 1971 musical fantasy "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory," starring Gene Wilder, was Stuart's response to a young reader of the Roald Dahl children's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That fan was Stuart's daughter Madeline, who asked her dad to make a movie of the book she loved. With Wilder as Willy Wonka (and 11-year-old Madeline in a cameo role as a student in a classroom scene), it became an enduring family favorite.
Other features include Stuart's 1969 comedy-romance, If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, starring Suzanne Pleshette and Ian McShane; the 1970 comedy I Love My Wife starring Elliott Gould and Brenda Vaccaro; and the 1976 telefilm Brenda Starr, toplined by Jill St. John as the famed comic book heroine.
A New York native, Stuart attended New York University, where he set aside his early aspirations to be a composer in favor of a career in filmmaking.
Before joining forces with the Wolper Organization, he was a researcher for CBS News' 1950s documentary series "The 20th Century," which was hosted and narrated by Walter Cronkite.
Besides his daughter, an interior designer, Stuart is survived by sons Andrew, a literary agent, and Peter, a filmmaker.
The Associated Press contrbuted to this report.
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