To say that movie producer Jeremy Thomas was British cinema royalty did not quite do justice to his meritocratic, democratic instincts. A brilliant and inexhaustibly creative man, self-effacingly charming and quietly spoken in a world of loudmouths and show-offs, and hypervigilant for new talent, was more like a cross between an entrepreneur, an enigmatically clever and kindly Cambridge don and the movie world’s favourite cool uncle, or maybe cool great-uncle.
Respectively son and nephew of directors Ralph Thomas and Gerald Thomas (of Doctor in the House and Carry On fame), he was born into the industry and as an independent producer combined the confidence of an old-fashioned studio boss with the soul of a cineaste, backing his own instincts and passions, befriending film-makers and doggedly pursuing projects over years.
Thomas won a best picture Oscar for Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic The Last Emperor in 1988, a movie which gained historic western access to Beijing’s Forbidden City and which in its way perfectly reflected Jeremy’s worldview: pioneering, ambitious, intellectually curious, globalist and internationalist. He produced Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout in 1978 and with Skolimowski, co-produced the black comic satire Good Boy as recently as 2025. His friendships and allegiances spanned the decades and he was a vital part of European independent cinema.
Among his vast list of credits, he produced Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing and Eureka in the 1980s, along with Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and Stephen Frears’s The Hit; in the next decade he produced Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky and David Cronenberg’s Crash, amiably laughing off the controversy for the latter. In the new century, he brought Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast to the screen and also Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, and Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins. He also directed a well received drama, All The Little Animals in 1998, with John Hurt and Christian Bale.
One of his movies, and perhaps my favourite of his, was Matteo Garrone’s amazing fantasy adventure Tale of Tales in 2015, which is in fact how I got to know him. After writing about it glowingly at Cannes, I stepped out of my hotel the next morning to find Jeremy beaming at me in the street; he hailed me cordially, although his refined murmur always meant you had to come close to him – a happy knack of creating intimacy, perhaps. And from then on, we almost always had lunch at Cannes, which meant being there while Jeremy genially held court at a table at the Grand hotel (as it then was, before changing its name to the Mondrian), or the Carlton or the Majestic beach. The rosé would flow – no LA nonsense about not “day-drinking” – the conversation also, and Jeremy would be forever calling over to friends and those who he sized up as future collaborators as they came past. He called this his “fishing” in Cannes, reeling in kindred spirits.
He was a superb creative flaneur, someone who always raised your spirits; I had lunch and afternoon tea with him in London as well and was honoured when Jeremy would sometimes come to the Christmas party of this newspaper’s film section. This is a terribly sad day for cinema lovers.
